Technician - Textbooks available on reserve

The other day I learned that the D.H. Hill library at North Carolina State University is collaborating with their campus bookstore to provide one copy of every required course textbook through their reserve desk.Technician - Textbooks available on reserve

This is an impressive attempt by an academic library to address student's needs for relief from the continual rise in the cost of textbooks.

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Textbook Affordability

Today I received my University of Denver alumni magazine and learned that a professor there is trying to address the high cost of textbooks through electronic texts. The magazine reprinted an article from October, 2008 about Daniels College of Business professor Don McCubbrey's work to solve the textbook affordability problem facing his students. He worked with his graduate students to develop an electronic book that would be affordable. But Professor McCubbrey was thinking about the cost of textbooks in a more global manner. If textbooks are too expensive for students in the United States, what does that mean for education in less developed areas. Working with Richard Watson of the University of Georgia, Professor McCubbrey founded of the Global Text Project. The Global Text Project's goal is to marshall the resources of the United States to bring 1,000 electronic textbooks to students in the developing world and help education around the world.

Is a New Era Dawning

A friend of mine asked me, in relation to libraries and cloud computing, if we were at a point where libraries were at a point where they were willing to forego the localization and customization that commercial ILS vendors provide for what OCLC be able to provide with their plan to provide web-based library management systems. His premise is that current commercial ILS vendors are responsive to library needs and adapt as needed. While I agree that librarians can make incredibly unrealistic demands on vendors, I'm not sure I agree with the assumption that current commercial vendors are particularly responsive or agile. Certainly this has something to do with the fact that the library automation market is limited with customers of finite resources. That may be the reason that vendors have not been able to keep up with the changing expectation of our users.

I'm not sure if cloud computing represents an answer to the challenges currently facing librarians and ILS vendors but the environment is inexorably changing. The idea of splitting out different ILS components and selecting the software packets that work best for individual libraries makes a lot of sense in my mind right now. At the CUWL meeting we were talking about having our patron database managed by the campus student/personnel system and library acquisitions/finances managed by the campus financial system. The idea of running our acquisition system through campus financials scares me to death but it makes sense budgetarily. In the current budget crises these types of efficiencies may be forced upon us. I remember going through an ILS vendor migration and the trade offs that change brought. I came to realize that no, one vendor had a product that worked well for all of our library's needs. At the same time I visited the library of the Universitat Freiburg. There they had one system developed for circulation, one for the catalog and one for financial management. Each was developed separately but all interacted with each other. I would like to see an environment where libraries could buy a circulation system from one vendor, a commercial financial system and a cooperatively developed open source resource discovery system. I don't know if current vendors have a business model that would support them being able to survive by selling there systems as discrete packets. They don't have the resources to invest in the r&d needed to keep up as it is. I'm convinced that the library automation business is just another of the businesses that libraries interact with that is facing a business model crisis; just like publishers.

CUWL Day Two

The second day of the CUWL conference started out with product demos from ExLibris and OCLC. The representative from ExLibris spoke about Primo and there new venture Universal Research Discovery and Delivery (URD2). The URD2 initiative looks like their attempt to address the issues that Marshall Breeding discussed yesterday. If it works, the system will harvest data from the library's ILS, DSpace, CMS, institution website and also "deep search" the library's licensed journal articles. They are also looking at ways to merge workflows in the back end that better link ebooks, licensing, journals and print.
The commercial concerns are being pressured by open source developers to better address our needs. The best quote I heard was the ExLibris rep describe open source developers as "a distraction" rather than a legitimate competitor.

OCLC continues moving steadily into the ILS world. We heard about their "web scale management services". As I understand it this initiative is a way to provide a "cloud computing" solution to manage library workflows. If this works it would take the OCLC cooperative model to our management processes. The example given was how libraries all have vendor files that they maintain individually. An OCLC cloud management service could provide a central shared space where libraries could cooperatively update one shared vendor file.

In the afternoon I attended a round table discussion of how system libraries are developing our electronic theses and dissertations repository. More and more Wisconsin universities are moving in this direction. UW-Eau Claire is moving deliberately, if cautiously, in this direction also. Dorthea Salo talked about the new software that the Digital Collections group is implementing. This software should make our system easier to manage, maintain and preserve. The big issue that came out of this was that CUWL needs to start thinking about data management. There is one project just beginning where a group at Madison is curating an archeology dataset. They are working with an archeologist who cataloged the results of excavations done in the first half of the 20th Century. In that period excavations could be much more comprehensive than what can be done currently so there is a lot work to be done to provide access to the data. The project looked very exciting. When I asked who provides a model for libraries moving into data curation, Dorothea said that Purdue is very active in the field. They have created a data curation department, D2C2.

CUWL Notes

The CUWL conference began with a welcome from Dr. Rebecca Martin, the UW Sytem Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs. Then Marshall Breeding delivered the keynote address looking at the library automation systems environment. It seems like the point that many people carried from his presentation was that the costs for commercial products and open source solutions are equivilant but show up in different areas. Overall the commercial ILS systems have not kept up with the migration from print to electronic resources. He reaffirmed librarians' widely-held frustration with current OPACs and bundled front end discovery systems. What I found interesting was his description of current business software solutions that rely on Service Oriented Architecture. I'm not sure I can write about this coherently but as I understand it, this architecture offers much more flexibility and uses a "Lego-like" middle structure that allow business and librarys the ability to mix our services in a way that is more adapted to the current environment. He remarked that the current model is based on rigid silos. and redundant data sources. Breeding thinks that new systems can be built to better allow libraries to provide access to electronic resources at the same level we provide access to our print collections.

Highlights that I took away from the talk:

1. An anecdote about the Harry Potter book he keeps on his coffee table. He was giving a presentation where he demonstrated Amazon's one-click purchase service. In doing so he accidentally bought the Harry Potter book and it arrived on his doorstep a couple of days later. He wondered how it is too bad that libraries don't have that kind of problem. Point being that many of our processes for getting from discovery to delivery are very cumbersome.
2. Discovery should be decoupled from the back-end automation system and should expose the entire spectrum of our collections. Discovery should be based on havesting to create indexes searched locally not by going out to our databases one at a time and returning a small subset of information. In other words we would continually or at least often download bibliographic records from our shared catalogs, the entire fulltext data from our database vendors as well as our government publications, digital archives and institutional repositories.
3. Two discovery products that he talked about were Summon - Serials Solutions' product in development and OCLC's WorldCat Local. Both are making arrangements with journal aggregators to provide access to physical library collections as well as fulltext journal articles.

Later in the day I attended a presentation on RDisco, a project being developed at UW Madison to create a de-coupled discovery system that would provide one place where users could discover books from the UW catalogs and digital material from our digital repositories. There work is in the very early stages of development but provide a glimpse at the possibility of developing a home grown discovery tool that addresses some of the needs that Marshall Breeding discused.