Moving to the network level: discovery and disclosure

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Moving to the network leveldiscovery and
disclosure

• Lorcan Dempsey
• ALCTS
• ALA Midwinter, Seattle
• January 19 2007

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The network rewrites behaviors
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A few things.

• Workflow and Attention
• Aggregation of demand and suppy the long tail

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18 months old No FaceBook, MySpace Library?
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University of Minnesota http//www.lib.umn.edu/abo
ut/mellon/KM20JStor20Presentation.pps
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Netvibes, onfolio, my yahoo, myspace, RSS
aggregator,
Self assembled digital identity
Prefabricated (e.g. CMS)
Database gt website gt workflow
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Workflow

• Then
• Users built workflow around the library
• Now
• The library must build its services around user
  workflow

Get into the flow Disclose into other environments
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Attention

• Then
• Resources scarce, attention abundant
• Now
• Attention scarce, resources abundant

Competition for attention
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Long tail information providers
Systemwide efficiences

• Aggregation of supply
• Unified discovery
• Low transaction costs
• Aggregation of demand

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Libraries and the long tail dynamic

• Aggregate demand?
• 20 of collection accounted for 90 of use
• (2 research libraries over 4 years)

• Aggregate supply?
• 1.7 of circulations are ILLs
• (60 of aggregate G5 collection owned by one
  library only)

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The Library Long Tail(using holdings as measure
of popularity)
Note All statistics are preliminary and
subject to change. Final report forthcoming soon.
Head
Number of Holdings
Figure not drawn to scale for illustration
purposes only
Long Tail
Items ranked by system-wide popularity
Head Top 10 of WorldCat records (ranked by
holdings) account for 80 of total WorldCat
holdings Long Tail Bottom 90 of WorldCat
records (ranked by holdings) account for 20 of
total WorldCat holdings
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ILL and the Long Tail(FY 2005 OCLC ILL
transactions)
Note All statistics are preliminary and
subject to change. Final report forthcoming soon.
75 of ILL requests were directed at the Head
Number of Holdings
25 of ILL requests were directed at the Long
Tail
Items ranked by system-wide popularity
By comparison, Chris Anderson (The Long Tail,
2006) reports Amazon 25 of sales from the
long tail Netflix 20 of sales from the
long tail
Question are current ILL systems adequately
supporting demand for the library long tail?
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For many years, Chinese people cited a proverb
if the wine smells really wonderful, customers
will come in spite of the length of the lane.
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The network rewrites the library discovery and
disclosure
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Chris Beckett http//www.scholinfo.com/presentati
ons/2006/8/10/the-new-world-order-in-collection-de
velopment-the-commercial-perspective.html
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Discovery focus on catalog with some related

• Local Discovery Environments
• Shared Discovery Environments
• Syndicated Discovery Environments
• Leveraged Discovery Environments

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Local Discovery environment

• Some (not necessarily aligned) motivations
• Make data work harder
• Integrate access to locally managed resources
• Escape from ILS limitations
• NCSU
• Rochester
• SOLR
• Worldcat 2.0
• Primo
• Encore

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Some remarks

• How does MARC data play with other data
• Subjects, authors, ..
• Historic investment in structure?
• Duplicate cost?
• Relationship to Metasearch?

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Shared discovery environment

• Increase impact
• Create gravitational pull
• Aggregate demand and supply
• Reduce costs

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Some comments

• Integration of discovery to delivery becoming
  essential
• A move to shared environments seems more likely
  with increased ability to view different levels
  
• Increased gravitational pull greater use of
  collections
• Growing evidence

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Syndicated discovery experience

• Syndicate data or service or links

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Syndicating services

• RSS
• Portlets
• APIs, Protocol-based

• Projects
• Sakailibrary

Not as rapid as one might expect?
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Some remarks

• Syndication of data now common among data
  providers
• Routing issue for non-unique materials
• Resolution
• Worldcat
• Libraries exposing licensed content holdings
  interesting
• Google Scholar

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• Service disclosure less common
• APIs
• Web services
• Portlets
• HTML fragments search boxes
• Toolbars
• Widgets, extensions,

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The Leveraged discovery experience

• In some ways the most interesting
• Use another discovery service to connect back to
  your resources
• Compare to the situation with article databases
  and resolvers

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Click look in OCLC Resolver Registry pass
through to the relevant library
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Some remarks

• Some of these are toy-like now, but indicate a
  direction
• Increased capacity to sense structure
  (microformats) will improve ability.

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So .

• The library website is not the front door
• We need to connect multiple discovery
  environments to library fulfilment options
• We need to put library resources in users
  workflow
• We need to place library resources in places
  which aggregate demand
• Need more robust machine interfaces for the ILS
  so that we can put its functionality in other
  places (medium term)

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And OCLC .