Creating (Library) Value in the Age of the Amazoogles University of British Columbia 2006 September 18 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  Systems & interaction design  ~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 Information Neutrality Public Trust  Technical Systems for supporting SCOAP activities Bookshelves 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? People who bought X, also bought Y LibraryThing 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

Extract (and exploit) value in structured data  Holdings are key  Enrich the data Amazon-like reviews Cover Art  Controlled vocabularies Terminology services Classification systems Folksonomies?  Authority control

Increase integration across boundaries  Make the OPAC irrelevant Solution of last resort The Green Screen of Boredom (or is that envy?)  “Weave libraries into the Web”

WorldCat in the Open Web  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!

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: The Tom Sawyer Strategy  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 Attributable Linked appropriately Permanently identified Curated

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, reduce ‘hackability’, 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