Marshall Breeding Director for Innovative Technology and Research Vanderbilt University Library Nashville, TN USA

 Marshall Breeding will discuss some of the trends that are taking place in the arena of next-generation resource discovery. Over the last few years, we have seen a major emphasis on replacing traditional online catalogs provided through our integrated library systems to a new generation of discovery environments, which operate independently from the ILS. Both open source and commercial products compete for attention. In recent months, yet another wave of products, with index populated with populated with enormous collections of content have entered the scene. Library automation has entered a new phase that calls into question almost all the previously held assumptions. Breeding will give a tour of this new landscape and the options and issues that face academic libraries.

Annual Industry report published in Library Journal:  2009: Investing in the future  2008: Opportunity out of turmoil  2007: An industry redefined  2006: Reshuffling the deck  2005: Gradual evolution  2004: Migration down, innovation up  2003: The competition heats up  2002: Capturing the migrating customer

 Industry Consolidation  Abrupt transitions for major library automation products  Increased industry control by external financial investors  Demise of the traditional OPAC  Frustration with ILS products and vendors  Open Source alternatives hit the mainstream Breeding, Marshall: Perceptions 2008 an international survey of library automation. January 2009.

 Consolidation through mergers and acquisitions have resulted in a fewer number of players; larger companies  Uncomfortable level of product narrowing  Increased ownership by external interests  Yet: Some companies and products continue on solid ground Breeding, Marshall “Automation system marketplace 2008: Opportunity Out of Turmoil” Library Journal. April 1, 2008.

 Innovation below expectations  Conventional ILS less tenable  Proliferation of products related to e-content management  New genre of discovery-layer interfaces

 Currently implemented ad hoc  Many libraries putting up blogs, wikis, and fostering engagement in social networking sites  Proliferation of silos with no integration or interoperability with larger library Web presence  Next Gen: Build social and collaborative features into core automation components

 Open Source Software ◦ Alternative to traditionally licensed software  Open Systems ◦ Software that doesn’t hold data hostage  Open Access to Data and Content ◦ OpenLibrary VS WorldCat?

 Explosive interest in Open Source driven by disillusionment with current vendors and increasing support of this software licensing model  Beginning to emerge as a practical option both in the ILS and discovery layer arenas  TOC (Total Cost of Ownership) varies relative to proprietary commercial model ◦ Many libraries document substantial savings  Both open source and commercial software involve risk

 Earlier era of pioneering efforts to ILS shifting into one where open source alternatives fall in the mainstream  Off-the-shelf, commercially supported product available  Still a minority player, but gaining ground

 Koha ◦ Commercial support:  LibLime – North America  BibLibre -- France  Evergreen ◦ Commercial support from Equinox Software  OPALS ◦ Commercial support from Media Flex  VuFind  Blacklight

 Some libraries moving from traditionally licensed products to open source products with commercial support plans  Disruption of library automation industry ◦ new pressures on incumbent vendors to deliver more innovation and to satisfy concerns for openness  Low-cost options may help moderate pricing of commercial products  New competition / More options

 Pressure for traditionally licensed products to become more open  APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) let libraries access and manipulate their data outside of delivered software  A comprehensive set of APIs potentially give libraries more flexibility and control in accessing data and services and in extending functionality than having access to the source code.  Customer access to APIs does not involve as much risk to breaking core system functions, avoids issues of version management and code forking associated with open source models.

 Lots of non-library Web destinations deliver content to library patrons ◦ Google Scholar ◦ Amazon.com ◦ Wikipedia ◦ Ask.com  Do Library Web sites and catalogs meet the information needs of our users?  Do they attract their interest?

 Urgent need for libraries to offer interfaces their users will like to use  Move into the current millennium  Powerful search capabilities in tune with how the Web works today  Meet user expectations set by other Web destination

 Online Catalog modules provided with an ILS subject to broad criticism as failing to meet expectations of growing segments of library patrons.  Not great at delivering electronic content  Complex text-based interfaces  Relatively weak keyword search engines  Lack of good relevancy sorting  Narrow scope of content

 Silos Prevail ◦ Books: Library OPAC (ILS module) ◦ Articles: Aggregated content products, e- journal collections ◦ OpenURL linking services ◦ E-journal finding aids (Often managed by link resolver) ◦ Local digital collections  ETDs, photos, rich media collections ◦ Metasearch engines  All searched separately

 Widespread dissatisfaction with legacy OPACs. Many efforts toward next- generation discovery layer products.  Movement among libraries to break out of the current mold of library catalogs and offer new interfaces better suited to the expectations of library users.  Decoupling of the front-end interface from the back-end library automation system.  Eventual redesign of the ILS to be better suited for current library collections of digital and print content

Concepts and Definitions

 Online Catalog ◦ Interface conventions from an earlier Web era ◦ Scope: Tied to the ILS and its content domain  Discovery Layer ◦ Modern interface elements ◦ Scope: aims to address broad range of components that constitute library collections 

 More comprehensive information discovery environments  It’s no longer enough to provide a catalog limited to print resources  Digital resources cannot be an afterthought  Systems designed for e-content only are also problematic  Forcing users to use different interfaces depending on type of content becoming less tenable  Libraries working toward consolidated user environments that give equal footing to digital and print resources

 Current distributed query model of federated search model not adequate  Expanded scope of search through harvested content ◦ Consolidated search services based on metadata and data gathered in advance (like OAI-PMH)  Problems of scale diminished  Problems of cooperation persist  Federated search currently operates as a plug-in component of next-gen interfaces.

 Strategic infrastructure + Web 2.0  A more social and collaborative approach  Web Tools and technology that foster collaboration  Integrated blogs, wiki, tagging, social bookmarking, user rating, user reviews  Avoid Web 2.0 information silos

 Simple point of entry ◦ Optional advanced search  Relevancy ranked results  Facets for narrowing and navigation  Query enhancement – spell check, etc  Suggested related results / recommendation service  Enriched visual and textual content  Single Sign-on

 Based on advanced search engines specifically designed for relevancy ◦ Endeca, Lucene, FAST, BrainWare, etc  Web users expect relevancy ordered results ◦ The “good stuff” should be listed first ◦ Users tend not to delve deep into a result list ◦ Good relevancy requires a sophisticated approach, including objective matching criteria supplemented by popularity and relatedness factors.

 Let users drill down through the result set incrementally narrowing the field  Faceted Browsing ◦ Drill-down vs up-front Boolean or “Advanced Search” ◦ gives the users clues about the number of hits in each sub topic ◦ Ability to explore collections without a priori knowledge  Visual search tools  Navigational Bread crumbs ◦ Select / deselect facets

 “Did you mean?” and other features to avoid “No results found”  Validated spell check / query suggestions  Automatic inclusion of authorized and related terms  More like this – recommendation service  Make the query and the response to it better than the query provided

 Attempt to collapse silos or draw appropriately from each silo  Unified user experience  A single point of entry into all the content and services offered by the library  Print + Electronic  Local + Remote  Locally created Content  User contributed content

 New-generation interface  Harvested local content  Vendor-supplied indexes of library content ◦ E-journals, databases, e-books ◦ Book collections beyond local library collections

 Indexing the full corpus of information available globally  Or at least major portions  Google aims to address all the world’s information  Not quite comprehensive – partial harvesting of any given resource  Discovery Layer Products for libraries aim to address all content collected by libraries:  Print  Remotely access electronic content: e-journals, e-books, databases, licensed and open access.  Local special collections: digital and print.  Addresses the comprehensive body of content held within library collections  Comprehensive, unified

 Entering post-metadata search era  Increasing opportunities to search the full contents ◦ Google Library Print, Google Publisher, Open Content Alliance, etc. ◦ High-quality metadata will improve search precision  Commercial search providers already offer “search inside the book” and searching across the full text of large book collections  Not currently available through library search environments  Deep search highly improved by high-quality metadata See: Systems Librarian, May 2008 “Beyond the current generation of next-generation interfaces: deeper search”

 Fulfillment oriented  Search -> select -> view  Delivery/Fulfillment much harder than discovery  Back-end complexity should be as seamless as possible to the user  Offer services for digital and print content

Current Commercial and Open Source Products

 AquaBrowser  Ex Libris Primo  Innovative Interfaces: Encore  Serials Solutions: Summon (under development)  Medialab Solutions: AquaBrowser  SirsiDynix Enterprise  The Library Corporation: LS2 PAC  VUFind (open source)  BiblioCommons  eXtensible Catalog (under development)

 Initial products focused on technology ◦ AquaBrowser, Endeca, Primo, Encore, VUfind ◦ Mostly locally-installed software  Current phase focused on pre-populated indexes that aim to deliver Web-scale discovery ◦ Summon (Serials Solutions) ◦ WorldCat Local (OCLC) ◦ EBSCO Discovery Service (EBSCO) ◦ All hosted services

 Local discovery provides flexibility for libraries to create customized access to collections  Web-scale discovery emphasizes unified access and broad scope

 New Discovery Service  Consolidated index harvested from many sources ◦ ProQuest, Gale, etc ◦ 300,000,000 articles represented ◦ Full-text search + Citations  Local catalog data harvested, real-time link to holdings  Other local repositories harvested  Others available through metasearch

 Existing service in pilot stage for new discovery service  WorldCat.org data + ArticleFirst (30 million articles)  Agreement with EBSCO to load EBSCOhost citation data into WorldCat  Pursuing agreements with additional content providers

 No-cost option to FirstSearch subscribers  No reclamation to reconcile local ILS with WorldCat  One ILS supported; must be among supported products  Program to expose thousands of libraries to WorldCat Local as a discovery option

 Extend WorldCat Local to include ◦ Circulation ◦ Delivery ◦ Acquisitions ◦ License Management  Positioned as Web-scale, cloud computing model, cooperative library system  Pilot sites being finalized; general availability in 2010