By: dempsey
Categories: General - systems and technologies• Libraries - systems and technologies• User experience

Layar created a ripple of interest a while ago. It is yet to be released. It is an application for Android based phones which will allow data from various partner resources to be 'layered' over the view through a camera phone. Partners discussed include banks (for ATMs), realtors, and a social network site with data about venues. They describe it as an augmented reality application: objects viewed through the camera may be augmented by data about those objects.

Layar is derived from location based services and works on mobile phones that include a camera, GPS and a compass. Layar is first avaliable for handsets with the Android operating system (the G1 and HTC Magic). It works as follows: Starting up the Layar application automatically activates the camera. The embedded GPS automatically knows the location of the phone and the compass determines in which direction the phone is facing. Each partner provides a set of location coordinates with relevant information which forms a digital layer. By tapping the side of the screen the user easily switches between layers. This makes Layar a new type of browser which combines digital and reality, which offers an augmented view of the world. [Sprxmobile - Layar]

[image: layar.eu via Tito Sierra M-Libraries 09 ppt]

Tito Sierra referenced Layar in his presentation about WolfWalk, project, at the Second M-Libraries Conference in Vancouver last week. WolfWalk is a pilot project at NCSU as I mentioned the other day. It is working on an iPod application which aims to create what Tito called a 'geomobile collection'. Here is what the project pages say:

A pilot project to create a mobile application that enables users to explore NC State campus history using a location-aware map-based interface. The application supports a map view (using Google Maps) with geotagged placemarks for approximately 60 major sites of interest on the NCSU campus, and a browse view for quickly locating a known site by name. Each site has several historical images associated with it that are sourced from NCSU Special Collections Research Center digital archives. [WolfWalk]

Tito discussed how they thought this would be of interest to alumni and was careful to describe it as a modest proof-of-concept. I thought it succeeded very well in demonstrating his contention that the challenge is not just to provide small-screen versions of digital collections but to leverage the capabilities of new mobile technologies to provide new ways of experiencing those collections. In this case, the collections augment the experience of the buildings on campus by providing historic context at the point of interaction; at the same time, the app provides a map-based approach to digital collections.

The screencast and powerpoint presentation are well worth a look. The WolfWalk pictures above are screenshots of the screencast.

Mlib09

Catching up on something from last month: Sharing Standards for Bibliographic Data Worldwide: An Overview of Changes in Cataloguing Practices, a talk by Barbara Tillett at the Atlantic Provinces Library Association Conference 2009 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Built on foundations established by the Anglo-American CataloguingRules (AACR), RDA (Resouce Description and Access) will provide a comprehensive set [...]

Seen on David Bigwood’s Catalogablog, quoting something else: IFLA Working Group on Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records (FRSAR) Invitation to participate: Review of “Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD) — Draft Report” Available through: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/FRSAR/index.html or directly from: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/FRSAR/report090623.pdf (2,800 kb) Comments deadline: July 31, 2009 FRSAD is the new name for FRSAR, just as FRAD started as [...]

By: dempsey
Categories: General - systems and technologies• Libraries - systems and technologies

I traveled home from the 2nd M-Libraries Conference in UBC, Vancouver, yesterday. I was interested to come across several relevant news stories in the reading materials I had bought en route: The Globe and Mail, The Economist (last week's, as it turns out), and The Financial Times. This underlined the topicality of the conference themes.

The iPhone was prominent at the conference, in discussion, but also in practice as they were slipped in and out of pockets and bags throughout. In an interesting presentation about their WolfWalk project, Tito Sierra of NCSU opened with some general remarks about geo-location and touch screens as distinctive capacities supporting new applications. He also reminded people of the importance of the Apple Apps store in reducing transaction costs for users: search and acquisition of apps was now straightforward. What Apple has done is to create a network of developers around its successful platform. The App Store is key to this as it allows app developers to find users, and users to find apps, and in the process the value of the iPhone/iTouch is increased. This point was reinforced in a story about Apple's success in countering the effects of the current downturn in the Financial Times. John Gapper quotes work by Hagel and Seely Brown of Deloitte which shows that lower costs of entry brought about by regulatory and technical trends are creating stronger competitive challenges for companies. Apple's ability to resist this trend depends on the way in which it has created a platform around which a network of partners has built thousands of apps. So, for the Palm Pre to be successful, for example, it not only has to compete with the iPhone on price and features, but also on its ability to become a platform for app developers. Much of the value of the iPhone now derives from the apps which are available to its users.

I was also struck by the number of Mlib09 delegates who were using netbooks. I suppose you would expect this at such a conference, but this did not make it any less striking. The Economist had an article on netbooks, focusing on their challenge to the computer and software industry generally. They report Gartner figures that 21M netbooks will ship this year, twice as many as last year, accounting for more than 15% of the laptop market. By the end of 2008, netbook pioneer Asus had sold nearly 5M Eees. I was interested to read that Microsoft was heavily discounting Windows XP to netbook providers to counter the Linux challenge. Acer and other firms plan to use Android.

One of the hits of the conference was the discussion by Kate Robinson of the use of QR Codes in the catalog at the University of Bath (blogged here earlier this year). It prompted discussion of the variety of ways in which people and materials could be tied into the network.

The Globe and Mail had several stories about capturing data from codes.

• Databars. A discussion of the use of Databars, smaller than barcodes, in retail and supply-chain operations.
• Samplesaint: a story about how this company, which creates digital media for cell phones, now distributes discount coupons for redemption by on-screen scanning at the checkout. Coupons can be received in various ways, including in response to an on-the-spot request by texting a number found on the relevant shelf.
• There is also a general discussion of the use of cell phones as payment devices.

Interestingly, these were opposite an advert for IBM (featuring a barcode image) which promoted its ability to make supply chains smarter and more efficient.

I’ve been wondering when Google would go at FRBR. Dan Cohen, one of the people behind Zotero, is at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference and he’s covering it on Twitter. He was just at a talk given by Jon Orwant, the Perl guru who now works on Google Books. There are 120M works & [...]

A FRBRy one-day preconference before the 2009 American Library Association conference is scheduled. Description taken from this PDF: RDA, FRBR, and FRAD: Making the Connection Friday, July 10, 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. This pre-conference concentrates on the role of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and the Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) in Resource Description [...]

E-mail announcement from Nathalie Schulz sent to the rda-l mailing list: News from the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA: Finalization of RDA text: The RDA text was handed to the co-publishers on schedule on 22 June. RDA is scheduled to be released at the end of November 2009. New Chair: Alan Danskin will be [...]

Beginning in 1991, OCLC used its Duplicate Detection and Resolution (DDR) software to match WorldCat bibliographic records in the books format against themselves to find and merge duplicates.

By mid-2005 when WorldCat migrated to its new platform, sixteen runs through WorldCat had been completed, resulting in the elimination of a total of 1.6 million duplicate records.

In 2005, a project was started to re-invent the DDR software to work in the new environment and to expand its capabilities to deal with all types of bibliographic records.  This large multi-year project is now bearing fruit.  Great improvements to our matching software, which are a key component of the new DDR, have regularly been incorporated into the batchloading process.  This helps bring both DDR and batchloading processes into alignment as never before in dealing with the problem of duplicate records in WorldCat.

In May 2009, the new software was put into production following rigorous planning, development, and testing.  In addition to its ability to deal with continuing resources, scores, sound recordings, visual materials, maps, and electronic resources, as well as books, this new DDR is much more sophisticated than its predecessor in its power to distinguish legitimate matches from incorrect ones.  It also has the flexibility to allow selection of certain categories of bibliographic records to target for deduplication.  Processing of small subsets of WorldCat against the live database has begun.  A full pass through the WorldCat database will begin later in 2009.

Having the new DDR software in production will result in the merging of a larger number of bibliographic records. Regular removal of duplicates will provide a better WorldCat for all its users.

By: dempsey
Categories: User experience• OCLC• RLG Partnership

The presentations from the 2009 RLG Partnership Annual Symposium: Hearing voices: connecting with users, enhancing services, are now available.

Here is how the event was described ..

User studies have become a critical component in developing and improving services in our institutions. However, investigations into the needs of users and potential users are expensive and time consuming. This event oriented attendees to the importance of user studies, highlighted findings from recent projects of interest and utility to the RLG Partnership, and laid the groundwork for future collaboration. [2009 Symposium agenda]

I was interested to read Arnold Arcolio's account of user selection on several Worldcat Local implementations. Arnold works for the User Experience Group at OCLC.

See the notes about usability and the symposium from me and from Jim at HangingTogether.

The main announcement about this is a PDF (!?) so I’ll quote first from a news announcement from The DOI System (that’s Digital Object Identifiers) that has some links: A new initiative, the Vocabulary Mapping Framework (VMF), has been announced by a consortium of partners. This will create an extensive and authoritative mapping of vocabularies from [...]

By: dempsey
Categories: Knowledge organization and representation

Terry Eagleton said somewhere that Raymond Williams was a librarian's nightmare, meaning presumably that his work crossed academic boundaries and resisted easy classification. Let's have a look using the Classify prototype.

The prototype provides access to more than 36 million WorldCat records that contain Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) numbers, Library of Congress Classification (LCC) numbers, or National Library of Medicine (NLM) Classification numbers.The records are grouped using the OCLC FRBR Work-Set algorithm resulting in a work-level summary of the class numbers assigned a title. You can retrieve a classification summary by ISBN, ISSN, UPC, OCLC number, or author/title. [About Classify]

OK, so here is what happens with The Country and the City, maybe the one of his works most likely still to be read. It leans to literature, history, sociology ...

Here is Keywords ...

And here is an early work, The Long Revolution ...

There is quite a bit that could be said here. It would be interesting to explore what the pattern of classification might reveal about intellectual trends or cross-disciplinary work. I will limit myself here to saying that it looks as if Eagleton may be right some of the time ;-)

By: dempsey
Categories: Books, movies and reading ...• ebooks and other e-resources

I have just read M-Libraries: Information use on the move: a report from the Arcadia Programme [pdf] by Keren Mills.

It provides an overview of recent trends in 'mobilized' library services, library services which use mobile communications. It reports the results of a survey of library users about their preferences and makes some recommendations for library services.

I was interested to read the following:

These results suggest it is not worth libraries putting development resource into delivering content such as eBooks and e-journals to mobile devices at present. EBooks are already accessible via some mobile phones, such as iPhones and Windows Mobile devices, and audio files such as podcasts and audio books can easily be played on many mobile phones or portable media players. At present, however, most users are put off by the constraints of the technology, such as poor screen quality. iPhone users are already more inclined to read eBooks on their phones, according to comments from the respondents to this survey. [M-Libraries: Information use on the move: a report from the Arcadia Programme pdf]

In the time when this report was being prepared we have seen major developments in the consumer ebook space. There has been discussion of Google Editions, new releases of the Kindle, and a variety of reading applications (e.g. Stanza, Eucalyptus), and several companies are working to provide various reading options.

One reason for this is given in the note above: the iPhone, and now other smartphones which are trying to compete, has made reading more congenial.

In this context, I wonder what sort of response Keren would get if she were to repeat her survey in, say, 3 years time.

Incidentally, Mike Shatzkin has an interesting presentation about the future of books here, given recently at Book Expo 2009.

From OCLC:

On June 3, 2009, WorldCat Collection Analysis hosted their first virtual User Group Meeting. The meeting included Jennifer Smathers, Head of Technical Services, SUNY Brockport, presenting how she’s using WorldCat Collection Analysis to jump-start SUNY’s efforts toward cooperative collection development.

In addition, Glenda Lammers, Global Product Manager, OCLC, shared details about the upcoming interdisciplinary studies enhancement to the service, as well as other recent enhancements that have been made. The meeting also included a question and answer session.

OCLC invites you to view the recording and share it with your colleagues.

Michalis Sfakakis and Sarantos Kapidakis, Eliminating Query Failures in a Work-Centric Library Meta-Search Environment, Library Hi Tech 27:2 (DOI: 10.1108/07378830910968236). Abstract: Purpose – This paper aims to describe how approaches such as semantic based query rewritings and FRBR work entities composition could solve existing problems and improve the overall behavior of a mediated based meta-search [...]

By: dempsey
Categories: Identity management, IPR and e-commerce• Personal

The Facebook username landgrab created a flurry of excitement over the weekend. Individuals 'claimed' their piece of network real estate in the form of a Facebook URL, and organizations had an opportunity to protect registered marks. I am now

http://www.facebook.com/lorcand

which chimes with my recently established Twitter presence

http://www.twitter.com/lorcand

I decided to consolidate on lorcand a little while ago, when I switched from the more opaque lisld on Twitter. Of course, this was late in my online life, meaning that - as most others do - I have a fractured online identity: it is pretty decentralized. I feel that I ought to more actively adopt some centering strategies (see below) but it never gets to the top of the list.

I am prompted by this experience to incorporate here a post of last year - centering the decentralised identity - which is still relevant ...

Andy Powell, network resident, has an interesting post about his 'fractured' network identity. How does he define identity?

"Digital identity is the online representation of an individual within a community, as adopted by that individual and/or projected by others. An individual may have multiple digital identities in multiple communities." [Andy Powell, eFoundations]

He describes how his digital identity is 'fractured' across many environments (FaceBook, Flickr, various home pages and blogs, Second Life, twitter, etc). Various professional or personal affiliations are explicitly visible in several 'friendspaces' (my word), on FaceBook and Twitter for example. Andy even confesses to an 'identity crisis' around his second life identity, Art Fossett.

I also have something of an identity crisis around Art Fossett - specifically concerning how closely the digital identities of Andy Powell and Art Fossett should be related. [eFoundations: define:digital identity]

Reading the entry, it seemed to me that Andy is talking about 'centering' this 'decentralized identity' in various ways: he talks about wanting to 'consolidate' his network presence.

(John Breslin schematically represents decentralized identity in a blog entry of some time ago.)

There are various centering or consolidating strategies ...

Andy talks about limiting the number of 'handles' his identity has - email addresses and user names, although he is not in a position where his personal identities can override his current work identity (at Eduserv).

He is working to center his network presence at http://andypowe11.net/ and has some interesting comments about steps taken or to be taken. These include the suggestion that his former place of work put redirects from historically superseded network presences to his current one so that he can capture their 'Google juice', which raises interesting questions about our view of the historical record on the web.

He also has some advice about the use of third party services, about control of domain names, and about where you build up 'google juice' as moving it may be outside of your control.

Several things struck me reading this post ...

• Andy's concerns here are probably in advance of most people's, but it seems clear that managing our network presences and the relationships between them is becoming of more interest. And this cuts across previous boundaries - between work, family and friends, for example - in different ways.
• My network identity is less decentralized than Andy's: overall, I am less residential ;-) Until recently, I would have seen this 'fracture' as simply a part of an ongoing transition into new ways of doing things. And I wouldn't have had the patience or the inclination to adopt various centering strategies. That said, I have been more conscious recently of where I want my network presence to be 'signed' and where I don't. To take an example close to home, I wrote some longish reviews on items in Worldcat; recently, I realised that I would like the system to be able to support in some way my assertion that I was their author, and now it does by linking to a profile page. I have tended to use lisld as a handle in a variety of places. Now, I would probably more consistently use something like LorcanDempsey where I was more concerned about 'signature', although I am quite attached to lisld ;-)
• Of course, Google is a strong bottom-up centering service (see Tony Hirst's interesting suggestion that an institution's de facto home page is the first page of Google results in a search for that institution). My first-page Google results tend to be dominated by this blog, but there are also current and previous work pages, some articles come and go, and more recently Wikipedia and Facebook make a showing. None of these is at a domain name controlled by me. This blog was established as an internal OCLC communications tool for a year before it was externalised so it is 'located' at OCLC (in several ways). Now, I am sure that it gets a ranking 'lift' from the OCLC domain name, but it also means that I cannot bring it with me as it now stands if I ever leave. In a sense, I lose some of that network capital. Of course this is quite reasonable from another view, but it does raise interestingly the balance between individual and institution.
• My name is not unique. However, it is not very common. Andy notes his 'Google nemesis', Andy Powell of Wishbone Ash. It would be interesting to know more about what the impact of findability in Google has been on the naming of children.
• Now, I know that there are various initiatives underway which may make our identities more portable. I assume - hope - that we will end up with the ability to port our identities flexibly, but that we also retain the ability to support decentralised identities which may not know very much, or anything, about each other ;-)

[Original post: centering the decentralized identity]

By: dempsey
Categories: Economics• Marketing• Metadata• OCLC• Standards

One of the recommendations of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control was that ways should be found of harnessing publisher data upstream of the cataloging process. The rationale was that this would make data about materials available earlier and reduce overall creation effort.

OCLC recently organized an invitational symposium which had this issue as a central topic. The report is an interesting set set of notes from the different perspectives of the multiple players involved. It discusses current practices and incentives to do things differently.

In a follow-on activity to the LC report, R2 Consulting are mapping the flow of MARC records in North American. The symposium notes say: "This list of distributors is much larger than originally anticipated and consists of a very diverse group of entities."

And, as I discussed the other day, the Research Information Network has published a report about UK practices, Creating catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world [Splash page; pdf], which also recommends greater re-use of records across the publishing and library worlds.

So, there certainly seems to be a convergence of interest here. Indeed, the potential benefits of such sharing have been a topic of discussion for many years. For example, at the OCLC Symposium, Brian Green, Executive Director of the International ISBN Agency, and I reminisced about UK initiatives to we had been party almost, gulp, twenty years ago to try to create the conditions for an 'all-through' system of bibliographic record exchange between the various players in the bookworld.

Now, clearly quite a lot has happened and as R2 reported above data flows through many parties. And publisher data does flow into CIP, and into various organizations which support libraries. Amazon has done much to underline the importance to publishers of having book metadata to support a variety of operations. That said, the renewed emphasis on publisher-library data flow, certainly from the library side, suggests that much more might be done.

Why has more not happened to promote the flow of metadata through the system, from publishers to libraries? Three things occur ...

First, there is the mechanical issue of data exchange. Onix has now emerged as a shared approach to disseminating publisher data. However, it is interesting reading the remarks about Onix in the report of the OCLC Symposium. Netlibrary reports that 10% of publishers supply data in ONIX, representing 50% of the supplied content. NLM also reported that 10% of publishers supply Onix, but that these account for 80% of materials catalogued at NLM. There were also lots of comments about the consistency of Onix data. However, one would expect improved technical apparatus to support data flow, not create the need for it.

This prompts the second question: what incentives exist and are they aligned across the system? Historically, metadata may have been created for different purposes. Publishers had an interest in the supply chain, and libraries an interest in inventory control. There may be a shared interest in discovery, but it has been approached differently in each area. In fact, one library interest is a recognition that more descriptive material (table of contents, summary, etc) is in fact very useful for users of their catalogs and other systems even though they have not historically made it a part of their catalog data. There may also be an interest in getting basic descriptive data earlier, to allow more time to be spent on other parts of record creation. What incentives exist for publishers to make data available to libraries? Amazon, and other agents in the supply chain, provide an incentive to make appropriate metadata available to support discovery and sales. Data is supplied for CIP purposes. Are there additional incentives? One may be to have enriched metadata flow back to publishers. Are there incentives here which are strong enough for a framework to emerge within which there is greater flow?

And third, related to this, and probably most important, is that the incentives on either side have not been strong enough to encourage organizations to develop services in this area which would make the flow a reality.

Of course, the reason that OCLC hosted the Symposium mentioned above is that it is now looking at whether it is sensible to begin providing such services. It is doing this in its 'next generation cataloging' program.
OCLC has launched a pilot project to explore upstream metadata capture and enhancement using publisher and vendor ONIX metadata. Pilot partners from the publishing, vendor and library communities are assisting us in this effort. We hope the pilot will result in ongoing processes for the early addition of new title metadata to WorldCat and enhanced quality and consistency in upstream title metadata used by multiple channels. [Next generation cataloging]

Update: In response to query, see here for more information about how OCLC can work with publishers and here for how OCLC works with book vendors to deliver cataloging data.

Postscript: The conversation with Brian Green prompted me to look up various pieces I wrote at the time which reflected some of the discussion we remembered. (I note that while I have difficulty opening Word files from that time, the RTF file is still readable.)

• Publishers and libraries: an all-through system for bibliographic data?
  International Cataloguing and Bibliographic Control. 20 (3), July/September, 1991, 37-41.
  RTF: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/ukoln/dempsey-1991-01/ubcim.rtf
• Users' requirements of bibliographic records: publishers, booksellers, librarians.
  ASLIB Proceedings, 42 (2), February 1990, 61-69. [Worldcat.org]
• Bibliographic records: use of data elements in the book world. Bath: Bath University Library, 1989. ISBN 0861970853 [Worldcat.org]

OCLC’s Xiaoming Liu has added some new features to their xID services, of which xISBN is probably the most familiar. xISSN and xOCLCNUM both support some new information. Check his blog post for links to the API, etc.

OCLC is offering a free webinar on the topic of parallel records on 2 dates in June 2009.  Parallel records are records for the same manifestation but cataloged in different languages that reside parallel to each other in WorldCat.

You can join the webinar either on Wednesday, June 17 from 4:00-5:00 PM EDT or on Tuesday, June 23 from 10:00-11:00 AM EDT to hear about parallel records.  The sessions will be recorded and one will be mounted on the web for viewing after the second webinar. 

Sign up is now available on the Expert Community webpage.  Go to:
http://www.oclc.org/us/en/worldcat/catalog/quality/expert/default.htm
The links to sign up for the webinars are in the right column under the heading “How to participate”. 

After you sign-up, OCLC will email you the access codes for the session. All you will need to attend is a Web browser. Audio will be provided through your Web browser.  You will need speakers or headphones connected to your workstation.  Audio will also be available via conference call.

Source: OCLC

By: dempsey
Categories: RLG Partnership• User experience

I was interested to see that MIT Libraries have a public page with links to various usability results. I thought it was quite interesting, and that, while acknowledging some local flavor, it might be useful if more libraries shared results in this way.

More generally, we know that there are a lot of local user study activities the results of which would be of interest to others.

There was some discussion of the benefits of such sharing at the 2009 RLG Partnership Annual Symposium: Hearing voices: connecting with users, enhancing services. (Presentations available soon.)

Jim builds on that discussion in a post over on HangingTogether ...

My screenagers aren't fundamentally different from your screenagers. My graduate students aren't fundamentally different from your graduate students. My students and faculty don't do their work in a fundamentally different way then yours. My clients expectations and use of a local library catalog are not fundamentally different than yours. Why would we imagine that the willingness to go beyond the first page of results in a catalog search is going to differ by institution? If we can accept that there is a system-wide relevance to these studies then we are well on the way to a shareable profile of our different client segments (academic/public, undergrad/graduate, casual user, etc.). We're well along on having a broad foundation on which to do further work that is more closely aligned with the distinctive services and impact that the library can have. [HangingTogether]

He goes on to make some interesting remarks about understanding users and their desire to connect with each other.

Related entries:

• A signed network presence: people as entry points again
• Some thoughts about egos, objects, and social networks

Mail sent from Rice Majors to AUTOCAT: The next meeting of the ALCTS FRBR Interest Group will be at ALA Annual in Chicago on Friday, July 10, from 10:30 am to 12:00 pm, in the Chicago Hilton. The room assignment is Northwest 1. If you would like to give a presentation or otherwise [...]