Moving to the network level:discovery and disclosure

Moving to the network level: discovery and disclosure Lorcan Dempsey ALCTS ALA Midwinter, Seattle January ?? 2007

The network rewrites behaviors

A few things….
Workflow and Attention
Aggregation of demand and suppy: the long tail

~18 months old No FaceBook, MySpace Library?

University of Minnesota http://www.lib.umn.edu/about/mellon/KM%20JStor%20Presentation.pps

Database > website > workflow Prefabricated (e.g. CMS) Self assembled digital identity Netvibes, onfolio, my yahoo, myspace, RSS aggregator, …

Workflow
Then
Users built workflow around the library
Now
The library must build its services around user workflow
Get into the flow Disclose into other environments

Attention
Then
Resources scarce, attention abundant
Now
Attention scarce, resources abundant
Competition for attention

Long tail information providers Systemwide efficiences
Aggregation of supply
Unified discovery
Low transaction costs
Aggregation of demand
Impact?

Libraries and the long tail dynamic
Aggregate supply?
1.7% of circulations are ILLs
(60% of aggregate G5 collection owned by one library only)
Aggregate demand?
20% of collection accounted for 90% of use
(2 research libraries over ~4 years)
Each reader his/her book Each book its reader

The Library Long Tail (using holdings as measure of popularity) Note: All statistics are preliminary and subject to change. Final report forthcoming soon. Number of Holdings Items ranked by system-wide popularity “ Head” “ Long Tail” Head: Top 10% of WorldCat records (ranked by holdings) account for 80% of total WorldCat holdings Long Tail: Bottom 90% of WorldCat records (ranked by holdings) account for 20% of total WorldCat holdings Figure not drawn to scale; for illustration purposes only

ILL and the Long Tail ( FY 2005 OCLC ILL transactions) Note: All statistics are preliminary and subject to change. Final report forthcoming soon. Number of Holdings Items ranked by system-wide popularity ~75% of ILL requests were directed at the “Head” ~25% of ILL requests were directed at the “Long Tail” By comparison, Chris Anderson ( The Long Tail, 2006) reports: Amazon: ~ 25% of sales from the “long tail” Netflix: ~ 20% of sales from the “long tail” * Question: are current ILL systems adequately supporting demand for the library long tail?

For many years, Chinese people cited a proverb: if the wine smells really wonderful, customers will come in spite of the length of the lane .

The network rewrites the library: discovery and disclosure

Chris Beckett http://www.scholinfo.com/presentations/2006/8/10/the-new-world-order-in-collection-development-the-commercial-perspective.html

Discovery: focus on catalog with some related …
Local Discovery Environments
Shared Discovery Environments
Syndicated Discovery Environments
Leveraged Discovery Environments

Local Discovery environment
Some (not necessarily aligned) motivations
Make data work harder
Integrate access to locally managed resources
Escape from ILS limitations
NCSU
Rochester
SOLR
Worldcat 2.0
Primo
Encore …

Some remarks
How does MARC data play with other data
Subjects, authors, ..
Historic investment in structure?
Duplicate cost?
Relationship to Metasearch?

Shared discovery environment
Increase impact
Create gravitational pull
Aggregate demand and supply
Reduce costs

Some comments
Integration of discovery to delivery becoming essential
A move to shared environments seems more likely with increased ability to ‘view’ different levels
Increased gravitational pull: greater use of collections
Growing evidence

Syndicated discovery experience
Syndicate data or service or links

Syndicating services
RSS
Portlets
APIs, Protocol-based
Projects
Sakailibrary
…
Not as rapid as one might expect?

Some remarks
Syndication of data now common among data providers
Routing issue for non-unique materials
Resolution
Worldcat
Libraries exposing licensed content holdings interesting
Google Scholar

Service disclosure less common
APIs
Web services
Portlets
HTML fragments – ‘search boxes’
Toolbars
Widgets, extensions, …

The Leveraged discovery experience
In some ways the most interesting
Use another discovery service to connect back to your resources
Compare to the situation with article databases and resolvers

Click – look in OCLC Resolver Registry – pass through to the relevant library

Some remarks
Some of these are toy-like now, but indicate a direction
Increased capacity to ‘sense’ structure (microformats) will improve ability.

So ….
The library website is not the front door
We need to connect multiple discovery environments to library fulfilment options
We need to put library resources in users’ workflow
We need to place library resources in places which aggregate demand
Need more robust machine interfaces for the ILS so that we can put its functionality in other places (medium term)

And OCLC ….

Moving to the network level:discovery and disclosure

by Lorcan Dempsey on Mar 13, 2007

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