Digital Library Executive Briefing 17 April 2008 John MacColl European Director, OCLC Programs & Research The Digital Futures Forum: Delivering web-scale library systems

The web-scale world Turmoil and chaos

RLG Programs analysis Large-scale information hubs (not libraries) Hidden resources needing network exposure Information consumer behaviour is changing Operating environments are changing A consensus is emerging But there are barriers to progress …

Within a few years … Comprehensive research collecting will soon be done by very few institutions Many more will concentrate on promoting their special and unique collections Museums and archives will seek to make their materials comprehensively available on the web Redundant physical collections will be managed in a centralised way Non-local physical materials will be acquired as digital surrogates Collecting foci will shift and gain emphasis There will be major reorganisations of staffing effort and changes in expertise requirements

Landscape upheaval Agile, rich, new players Library budget pressure Service fragmentation Redundant effort Shallow client connections

Urgency The last 2-3 years have seen significant changes in the environment (OCLC Perceptions Report) Respondents use search engines to begin an information search (84 percent). One percent begin an information search on a libraryWeb site. (Part 1.2) Search engines are rated higher than librarians. (Part 2.6) Respondents do not trust purchased information more than free information. The verbatim comments suggest a high expectation of free information. (Part 3.4) Library users like to self-serve. Most respondents do not seek assistance when using library resources. (Part 2.4) Huge impact on expectations – including those of researchers How do we move closer to an ideal system-wide organisation?

Current context Network-level aggregation of supply and demand Newly conditioned expectations affect patterns of learning, research, information production and consumption Personal collections and data production Social media and social networking

Revenues of key players Source: Michael Jubb, RIN. Conference on Sustaining the Digital Library, Edinburgh, September 2007

David and Goliath? Profits: Microsoft ~£7bn, Google ~£1.8bn Microsoft expenditure on R&D is equal to the UK Science Budget (£3.4bn); Googles is ~£1bn UK national and university libraries total expenditure is less than half Googles R&D spend Even in the US and Canada, the total spend of the relatively well-endowed ARL libraries amounts only to £1.8bn So an obvious point to make here is that, in a context where commercial companies are clearly already players in the business of developing, providing, and sustaining digital content, it would be foolish to cut ourselves off from the resources that they have available to invest Source: Michael Jubb, RIN. Conference on Sustaining the Digital Library, Edinburgh, September 2007

Discovery happens elsewhere ~20,000) (Typical UK research university library alexa.com traffic ranking

How we are responding Trends and imperatives

Insertion into the flow

The changing LMS The Integated Networked Library System Deconstructing the LMS … … the network-level OPAC (WorldCat Local) Network-level ERM (reducing redundancy) OSS LMSs: Koha; Evergreen Software as a Service Divesting institutional hardware and software (the utility model)

The collective collection Industrial-scale digitisation (move away from boutique) Harmonised digitisation Digitisation on-demand (user pays?) Industrial-scale digitisation of special collections and archives (Get over it) Shared print storage (who has the last copy?) Community solutions to preservation: CLOCKSS; Portico

Collections freed from buildings LAM convergence Collection revelation (metadata, then interoperability, then full- text) Greene-Meissner imperative

Awake in a web world Library services rethought for the web architecture Resources (URIs) not repositories Usage Factor becomes the new Impact Factor The reader is an e-shopper Employing the hive mind; users as contributors and fact-checkers Universal Loss of Control?

Feels free Copyright disappears Licensed payment - journals and textbooks Funder-paid Open Access More sophisticated barriers to unlicensed usage

The changing economics of academic libraries? Consolidate low-use print Pool licensing purchase power Move into research flows Curation/Preservation Locally-curated digital content

The Research Outputs Management Environment The third-party-published journal article will lose its authoritative place in the research outputs environment Change drivers: Open Access; research assessment; academy-produced metrics; data publication Control moving back to the Academy Research funder pays: SCOAP3 Baseline price set by libraries, not publishers?

Possibilities with web-scale library data

Web-scale library data and players

The cooperative imperative WorldCat represented cooperation in cataloguing Just the beginning? We need to continue to leverage the investment in new and imaginative ways

Thank You! Questions? (Images courtesy of