Open Libraries “… are signs of life and hope: They are the cornerstone of democracy”

Flickr in Libraries

The Libraries and Librarians Flickr group, which populates the front page of this weblog, now has over 750 members and 4000 photos.

And group subscriptions can be exported in OPML format from the Recent Groups page.

Update: A few libraries using del.icio.us.

And the ALA is on flickr.

Using Drupal to put Endnote online

There is still no easy way to manage a library of references on a personal or institutional site. Librarians who want to put up a list of institutional publications, or researchers who want to share references are limited by existing software limitations, privacy concerns, or technical road blocks. This problem has been mitigated by a open source CMS with a handy bibliographic data module.

The Drupal content management system is attractive to many librarians and information scientists because of its deep use of taxonomy. Daniel Chudnov uses it to power Open Source Systems for Libraries, and his personal weblog, One Big Library. Roy Tennant uses Drupal for the TechEssence.info, and the Ann Arbor Public Library uses it for user registration, resource weblogs, and the overall site.

However, state of the art in bibliographic management and collaboration is still stuck in 1990. When a writer wants to collect articles, there are a number of client applications (all owned by Thomson ISI ResearchSoft, including Endnote, ProCite, and Reference Manager, plus WriteNote) that do a nice job of saving the references and integrating with word processors to format the citations.Endnote is the most commonly-used program, but it was not designed to share references. Modern science is all about collaboration, from grant proposals to international research. In the worst case, sharing an Endnote library on a network server can cause corruption. In the best case, shared Endnote libraries are limited to read-only if another person has it open, which limits collaboration.

A version of EndnoteWeb has been in development for most of 2006, and is promised by January of next year. Early reports of integration with Web of Science tell of limited functionality and interoperability.In 2002, a number of former Reference Manager employees waited for their non-compete agreements with ISI to expire, then founded RefWorks, an online version of the familiar bibliographic managers.In the last two years, applications including Connotea and CiteULike have integrated bilbiographic manager capabilities to their social bookmarking applications. Both allow RIS and BibTeX upload and download to systems managed at Nature Publishing Group and the University of Manchester, respectively.

At Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory the annual reports of the institution have listed lab publications for over 100 years. These references have not been added to Pubmed, which still only goes back to 1950. Thus, this unique information needed to be put into a format so that scholars could cite the early history of genetics, and the tragic misfire of eugenics research.

Many approachs were tried. One early method was programmer-centric, where the data was entered into a SQL database and a web front-end was scripted to add basic fields. While this was a promising start, it left out the rich data fields that enable bibliographic managers to capture complete citation information.

Since the library was examining digital asset management systems, Greenstone was assessed for its citation abilities. Ian Witten was able to jury-rig a solution that imported RIS information about citations, but getting them to display in a full way wasn’t simple.

As the prototyping continued, the initial database of 1800 records was exported out of the SQL database into comma separated value (CSV) format, and imported into Endnote. The archives clerk started assessing the reference types, and added new fields. For example, Institution was added so that a sort by the name could be used. A new reference type was added for non-standard reports.

In the process of adding this information, Endnote’s integration with OpenURL became useful. Using the standard bibliographic fields, it was possible to launch a search that queried the library’s subscriptions to see if a full-text version existed. And for many articles in Science magazine, a full-text scan was available.In the short-term, links to the JSTOR archive were added to Endnote. Longer-term, it would be useful to put in COinS from the web interface so that every citation could be queried via OpenURL.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory already had a site license for Endnote, so switching to RefWorks wasn’t feasible. In addition, the local version of Connotea isn’t exacly lightweight to deploy, requriing two MySQL databases and memcached to handle the online load. Since Nature is currently funding the open-source project, questions were raised about the continuting development of the project.

The archives clerk finished the authority control work on the Endnote database, which included hand-checking the references to the print version of the annual reports. Once this was completed, a need was voiced to make these references available online.

Ron Jerome of the National Research Council Canada Institute for Chemical Process and Environmental Technology wrote a Bibliography module for Drupal which allows Endnote import in .enw or XML formats. This module is currently being extended to allow Open Archives Initiative harvesting.

This module was installed, and the 2200 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory publications from 1890-1950 were imported into MySQL. The display is clear, and the default display is citation format. All other fields were imported, but live in the database for display on demand.

This module holds great promise for archive integration, since harvesting by OAI would allow libraries to harvest the records from web resources that aren’t specifically enabled for archives management. Endnote format is a lowest barrier format for scientists and researchers.

In the future, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory hopes to integrate these early records with the other archives collections managed by Digitool. For now, other laboratories and libraries can use Drupal and the Bibliography module for easy reference sharing.

Amusing post about weblogs

Wired 14.07: START

Your Blog Blows, and Here’s Why

1. You aren’t kamikaze enough to risk your career by revealing the soul-crushing absurdity of your job.

2. You aren’t sufficiently vain or presumptuous to declare yourself a hot twentysomething female (even if it’s true).

3. You lack a diagnosed sleep disorder, minor substance abuse problem, mercurial temperament, and/or innate desire to alienate loved ones.

4. You’re not ready to declare on the Internet what you really think about the raging hypocrites nesting in your life.

5. You have yet to explore the wonders of shameless self-promotion, groveling, and media whoring. Profiles in The New York Times don’t always come free.

- Ruth Fowler

ALA 2006: Top Tech Trends

In yet another crowded ballroom, the men (and woman) of LITA prognosticated on the future of libraries and technology.

Walt Crawford moderated the panel and spoke in absentia for Sarah Houghton. Her trends were:

• Returning power to content owners
• An OCLC ILS with RedLightGreen as the front-end
• Outreach online

Karen Schneider listed four:

• Faceted Navigation, from Endeca and others
• eBooks–the Sophie project from the Institute for the Future of the Book
• The Graphic Novel–Fun House
• Net Neutrality

Eric Lease Morgan listed several, and issued a call for a Notre Dame Perl programmer throughout his trends:

• VoIP, which he thought would cure email abuse
• Web pages are now blogs and wikis, which may cause preservation issues since they are dynamically generated from a database
• Social Networking tools
• Open Source
• Metasearch, which he thought may be dead given its lack of de-duplication
• Mass Digitization, and the future services libraries can provide against it
• Growing Discontent with Library Catalogs
• Cataloging is moving to good enough instead of complete
• OCLC is continuing to expand and refine itself
• LITA 40 year anniversary–Morgan mentioned how CBS is just celebrating their 55th anniversary of live color TV broadcasting

Tom Wilson noted two things: “Systems aren’t monolithic, and everything is an interim solution.”

Roy Tennant listed three trends:
Next generation finding tools, not just library catalogs. Though the NGC4Lib mailing list is a necessary step, metasearch still needs to be done, and it’s very difficult to do. Some vendors are introducing products like Innovative’s Encore and Ex Libris’ Primo which attempt to solve this problem.
The rise of filtering and selection. Tennant said, “The good news is everyone can be a publisher. And the bad news is, Everyone can be a publisher.”
Rise of microcommunities, like code4lib, which give rise to ubiquitious and constant communication.

Discussion after the panelists spoke raised interesting questions, including Clifford Lynch’s recommendation of Microsoft’s Stuff I’ve Seen. Marshall Breeding recommended tagging WorldCat, not local catalogs, but Karen Schneider pointed out that the user reviews on Open World Cat were deficient compared to Amazon.

When asked how to spot trends, Eric Lease Morgan responded, “Read and read and read–listservs, weblogs; Listen; Participate.” Roy Tennant said, “Look outside the library literature–Read the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Business 2.0. Finally, look for patterns.”

More discussion, and better summaries:
LITA Blog » Blog Archive » Eric Lease Morgan’s Top Tech Trends for ALA 2006; “Sum” pontifications
LITA Blog » Blog Archive » The Annual Top 10 Trends Extravaganza
Hidden Peanuts » ALA 2006 - LITA Top Tech Trends
ALA TechSource | Tracking the Trends: LITA’s ALA Annual ‘06 Session
Library Web Chic » Blog Archive » LITA Top Technology Trends

ALA 2006: Future of Search

This oversubscribed session (I sat on the floor, as did many others) featured Stephen Abram of Sirsi/Dynix/SLA president and Joe Janes of the University of Washington debating the future of search, moderated by LJ columnist Roy Tennant.

Abram asked a pointed question, which decided the debate early, “Were libraries ever about search? Search was rarely the point…unless you wanted to become a librarian.”  In Abram’s view, the current threat to libraries comes from user communities like Facebook/MySpace, since MySpace is now the 6th largest search engine. Other threats to libraries include the Google patent on quality.

Abram said the problem of the future is winnowing, and that you cannot teach people to search.”Boolean doesn’t work,” he said. Abram felt it was a given that more intelligence needs to be built into the interface.

In more sociological musings, Abram said “Facts have a half-life of 12 years,” and social networks matter since “teens and 20s live through their social networks. The world is ahead of us, and teams are contextual. People solve problems in groups.”

Joe Janes asked, “What would happen if you made WorldCat open source? Would the fortress of metadata in Dublin, OH crumble?” When asked if libraries should participate in OpenWorldCat, Abram said, “Sure, why not? Our competitor is ignorance, not access. Libraries transform lives.”

Janes pointed out that none of the current search services (Google Answers, Yahoo Answers, and the coming Microsoft  Answers) have worked well, and Tennant said “While Google and Yahoo may have the eyeballs of users, libraries have the feet of users.”

In an interesting digression from the question at hand, Abram asked why libraries aren’t creating interesting tools like LibraryThing and LibraryELF (look for a July NetConnect feature about the ELF by Liz Burns). Janes said it comes back to privacy concerns, since this is the “looking over your shoulder decade. Hi, NSA!” With the NSA and TSA examining search, banking, and phone records, library privacy ethics are being challenged like no recent time in history.

Roy Tennant asked if libraries should incorporate better interface design, relevance ranking, spelling suggestions, and faceting browsing. Abram said it’s already happening at North Carolina State University with the Endeca catalog project. The Grokker pilot at Stanford is another notable example, and the visual contents and tiled results set mirror how people learn. “Since the search engines are having problems putting ads in visual search, it’s good for librarians.”

Abram got the most laughter by pointing out that the thing that killed Dialog was listening to their users. As librarian requests made Dialog even more precise, “At the end of a Dialog search, you could squeeze a diamond out of your ass.” Janes said the perfect search is “no search at all, one that has the lightest cognitive load.”

Since libraries are, in Janes’ words, “a conservation organization because the human record is at stake, the worst nightmare is that nothing changes and libraries die. The finest vision is to put Google out of business.” Abram’s view was libraries must become better at advocacy and trust users to lay paths through catalog tagging and other vendor initiatives.

The question of the future of search turned into the future of libraries, and Joe Janes concluded that “Libraries are in the business of vacations we enabled, cars we helped fix, businesses we started, and helping people move.” Abram ended with a pithy slogan for libraries, the place of “Bricks, Clicks, and Tricks.”

Other commentary here:
The Shifted Librarian: 20060624 Who Controls the Future of Search?
Library Web Chic » Blog Archive » The Ultimate Debate : Who Controls the Future of Search
LITA Blog » Blog Archive » The Ultimate Debate: Who Controls the Future of Search
AASL Weblog - The Ultimate Debate: Who Controls the Future of Search?