The Web and the OPAC - Creating (Library) Value in the Age of the Amazoogles National Autonomous University of Mexico 9 October 2006 Stuart L. Weibel Senior Research Scientist, OCLC Research Visiting Scholar, University of Washington iSchool

OCLC Research Research and standardization: OCLC services Membership Library evangelism to the Web community Metadata management Knowledge organization Content management Interoperability Users and systems interactions ~30 employees

What do we mean by value? The Library Business Model Make information look free to end users Aggregation of public resources for management, organization, and curation of public content The SCOAP (of the) Mission Selection Collection Organization Access Preservation Return on investment Return of Patrons

Value Domains Societal Long term, authoritative curation of the cultural, technical, and scientific assets of a society Different challenges in paper versus electronic libraries Information Neutrality Public Trust Technical Systems for supporting SCOAP activities Bookshelves and furniture Cataloging (and catalogs) Electronic systems

Value Domains Societal Long term, authoritative curation of the cultural, technical, and scientific assets of a society Different challenges in paper versus electronic libraries Information Neutrality Public Trust Technical Systems for supporting SCOAP activities Bookshelves and furniture Cataloging (and catalogs) Electronic systems

Value Domains (continued) Social: So-called Library 2.0 approaches Policies and services to promote community engagement Recommender Services (reader advisories) Ala Nancy Pearl (a real librarian!)? People who bought X, also bought Y (Amazon.com) Book Reviews (again, Amazon.com) LibraryThing.com Tagging – folksonomies: what value? Public Bibliography What is more important for discovery? A book review or a MARC record? Linking structure among first class objects is a central feature of the Web

The Nancy Pearl Action Figure (complete with shushing action!)

Value Domains (continued) Social: So-called Library 2.0 approaches Policies and services to promote community engagement Recommender Services (reader advisories) Ala Nancy Pearl (a real librarian!)? People who bought X, also bought Y (Amazon.com) Book Reviews (again, Amazon.com) LibraryThing.com Tagging – folksonomies: what value? Public Bibliography What is more important for discovery? A book review or a MARC record? Linking structure among first class objects is a central feature of the Web

Everything 2.0 (Web 2.0, Library 2.0….) Bringing people back into the loop through the use of so- called Social Software: Andrew McAfees SLATES pneumonic: Search: Find what you need, enhanced by emergent description (see tags, below) Links: link relationships or link ranking algorithms Authoring: Ease of content creation – spare me the angle brackets, make it bone simple Tags: What do my colleagues call this? I bet it works better than what the IT department calls it Extensions: If you thought X was [good | interesting | important | useful], you might, by extension, find Y so Signals: tell me something has changed

Extract (and exploit) value in structured data Holdings are key – who has the item? Links to catalogs and virtual reference services Enrich the data Amazon-like book reviews Cover art & table of contents (full text?) Controlled vocabularies (esp Medicine, law, sciences) Folksonomies? Classification systems Authority control

Increase integration across boundaries The OPAC is becoming irrelevant for end-users (but remains a local management tool Solution of last resort for users OPACs have less functionality than other alternatives (Amazoogles) Weave libraries into the Web Drive our services into the open Web Unplug & Play Search engines Social software systems

WorldCat in the Open Web WorldCat subsets determined by the search engine (not the complete database) On these sites: Include either of the following with your search terms: Google "find in a library" (include phrasing quote marks) Google Yahoo! site:worldcatlibraries.org (no space after colon) Yahoo! English speakers wont do this… can you imagine speakers of other languages???

Other WorldCat Partner Sites: Abebooks (abebooks.com)abebooks.com Alibris (alibris.com)alibris.com Amazon.com (amazon.com)amazon.com Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America (abaa.com)abaa.com Biblio (biblio.com)biblio.com BookPage (bookpage.com)bookpage.com DirectTextbook (directtextbook.com)directtextbook.com Google Scholar and Google Books (scholar.google.com, books.google.com)scholar.google.com books.google.com Greenwood Publishing Group (greenwood.com)greenwood.com HCI Bibliography (hcibib.org)hcibib.org Windows Live Academic (academic.live.com)academic.live.com

Some general principles for technical value creation in a network environment Reduce impediments to search Increase integration across boundaries Build Network Effect value Extract (and exploit) value in structured data Increase the efficiency of metadata creation Promote participation Book reviews Linking Recommender systems

Public Bibliography: Metadata is expensive Cataloging data is important, costly, and ill-suited to public use (at least for some aspects of public use) Mobilizing users to be participants in the creation of metadata (in the form of book reviews, recommender services, and linking, either explicit or inferred) is a potentially rich source of metadata and linking currency Amazon is effective at this LibraryThing has a strong and growing approach Libraries and large cooperative cataloging agencies are thus far not doing so well.

Book Reviews: Desirable Characteristics of First Class Objects Book Reviews are (should be) stand-alone First Class Objects: Harvestable – findable by search engines on the Web Attributable – I want credit… Linked appropriately to a persistent catalog such as World or a national catalog Persistently identified (the identifier is stable over time) Curated (the content is stable over time)

Link Currency Linkages are an important currency on the Web: Who links to you Who do you link to To rise in relevance rankings, library-managed links should be persistent and of one form: Multiple identifiers are confusing and dilute link currency.

Libraries must compare favorably with related information experiences that our patrons expect: Discovery and recommender services Web 2.0 social network capabilities Experiences of comparable commercial service providers Last-mile delivery capability Bookstore social experience Coffee-shop salons People to help us navigate the intricacies of a complicated knowledge space We are offering an experience as well as a service

Stuart L. Weibel Visit me at: Contact me at: Thank you for your attention