Doing More with Less:
The Crisis, Cooperation, and the
Library
Christopher J. Mackie
NELINET Annual Conference
Devens, MA, 1 June 2009

Keep in mind…
• The views presented here are my own, not necessarily
those of my colleagues or of The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation
• The conclusions reached here reflect my own
knowledge and educated guesses based on
information gleaned from the public press and
conversations with your peers and colleagues: others
might reach different conclusions on the same data
• All of the projects and approaches described here
succeed or fail based on the wisdom and effort of their
participants: “Your Mileage May Vary”
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Mellon’s RIT Program
• 50+ OSS/CSS Projects since 2000
• Scholarly Tools:
– Sophie, VUE, Zotero, Decapod
• Museum, Performing Arts Projects:
– FluidEngage, ProjectAudience, CollectionSpace
• Administrative Cyberinfrastructure:
– Kuali Financials, Kuali Coeus, Kuali Student, etc., etc.
• Scholarly Cyberinfrastructure:
– Bamboo, Open Annotation, OLE, OpenCast, Sakai, SEASR
• Middleware for Cyberinfrastructure:
– Fluid, ESB, uPortal
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RIT “Original Synergy” (6/2009)
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RIT Software Usage
10‐30m users/daily; 300m+ users peak
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Community Source Software
• Collaboration among institutions to design, build,
govern(, and operate) software addressing
shared needs/concerns
• Cost amortization; risk reduction; stability
enhancement
• Examples: Sakai, uPortal, Kuali, OpenCast, SEASR,
Bamboo, others—and OLE (more about OLE
later)
• Healthy, competitive vendor market ensures
access by institutions lacking IT resources
– IBM, Sun, Oracle
– rSmart, Unicon
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Sustainability
• Metrics:
– Great: improves ROI, productivity, reduces risk, etc., for org and
constituents
– Good: improves ROI, reduces risk, etc., for scope of project
– Bad: Inflates direct or hidden costs, increases risk, destabilizes other
sustaining activities
• Examples:
– Great: Consortial provision of ILS dramatically reduces TCO‐per‐
institution by leveraging open source vendor markets
– Good: Consortial provision of ILS smoothes economic spikes, allows
institutions to assure more consistent services despite budget
volatility
– Bad: Consortial provision of ILS mimics “vendor lock‐in” model,
creating same hidden costs as individual provision, plus costs of
collaboration
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Project OLE (Open Library Env’t)
• Objective: Next‐generation ILS & global CoP for a Web 2+ world
• Eliminate traditional/digital library dichotomy; integral electronic
resources, collaboration, consortial support
• “Enterprise” tech: extend library more deeply into teaching &
research missions
• Weaving academic libraries together into a single, seamless Web of
knowledge
• 120+ institutions participated in worldwide design effort, including
many RUs, LACs, state, & national libraries
– Consortia well‐represented, including VALE, others
• Build to begin 12/2009; first deliverables expected 12/2010
– Seeking build‐partners now, including consortial partners
– No in‐house tech capacity required, to participate or deploy
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OLE and CriticalMASS
• Mission
– Good: serves existing needs of libraries for ILS
– Great: Supports next‐gen OPACs, finding aids to full extent of their capabilities
– Great: “Enterprise” approach allows library to reach deeper into teaching/research
missions
• Agility
– Good: Open standards, open source means improved ability to respond
– Great: CoP provides intel, best‐practices to perceive, prioritize, respond
• Sovereignty
– Good: Healthy vendor ecosystem means fair value for money
– Great: IP ownership vested in Mission‐aligned entity
– Great: “You can fire the vendor without firing the software”
• Sustainability
– Good/Great: Costs, risks amortized over all participants
– Good: Wider choice of business models means closer fit to needs
– Great: CSS should allow easier, smoother adaptation to economic changes
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For More Information…
• Project OLE: http://www.oleproject.org/
• Other Community Source Projects
– www.kuali.org (admin and financial services)
– www.sakaiproject.org (learning mgt & research collaboration)
– www.ja‐sig.org/uportal (portal software)
– www.opencastproject.org (campus audio/videocasting)
– www.seasr.org (rich‐media scholarly analysis)
– www.projectbamboo.org (Arts & Hum scholarly support)
– http://www.openannotation.org/ (scholarly annotation)
• Me
– c j m @ m e l l o n . o r g
– http://rit.mellon.org
– Christopher J. Mackie
Associate Program Officer, Research in IT
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
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