Title: The Web and the OPAC - Creating (Library) Value in the Age of the Amazoogles National Autonomous University of Mexico 9 October 2006
1The Web and the OPAC - Creating (Library) Value
in the Age of the Amazoogles National
Autonomous University of Mexico 9 October 2006
- Stuart L. Weibel
- Senior Research Scientist, OCLC Research
- Visiting Scholar,
- University of Washington iSchool
2OCLC Research
- Research and standardization
- OCLC services
- Membership
- Library evangelism to the Web community
- Metadata management
- Knowledge organization
- Content management
- Interoperability
- Users and systems interactions
- 30 employees
3What do we mean by value?
- The Library Business Model
- Make information look free to end users
- Aggregation of public resources for management,
organization, and curation of public content - The SCOAP (of the) Mission
- Selection
- Collection
- Organization
- Access
- Preservation
- Return on investment
- Return of Patrons
4Value Domains
- Societal
- Long term, authoritative curation of the
cultural, technical, and scientific assets of a
society - Different challenges in paper versus electronic
libraries - Information Neutrality
- Public Trust
- Technical
- Systems for supporting SCOAP activities
- Bookshelves and furniture
- Cataloging (and catalogs)
- Electronic systems
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6Value Domains
- Societal
- Long term, authoritative curation of the
cultural, technical, and scientific assets of a
society - Different challenges in paper versus electronic
libraries - Information Neutrality
- Public Trust
- Technical
- Systems for supporting SCOAP activities
- Bookshelves and furniture
- Cataloging (and catalogs)
- Electronic systems
7Value Domains (continued)
- Social So-called Library 2.0 approaches
- Policies and services to promote community
engagement - Recommender Services (reader advisories)
- Ala Nancy Pearl (a real librarian!)?
- People who bought X, also bought Y (Amazon.com)
- Book Reviews (again, Amazon.com)
- LibraryThing.com
- Tagging folksonomies what value?
- Public Bibliography
- What is more important for discovery? A book
review or a MARC record? - Linking structure among first class objects is a
central feature of the Web
8The Nancy Pearl Action Figure(complete with
shushing action!)
9Value Domains (continued)
- Social So-called Library 2.0 approaches
- Policies and services to promote community
engagement - Recommender Services (reader advisories)
- Ala Nancy Pearl (a real librarian!)?
- People who bought X, also bought Y (Amazon.com)
- Book Reviews (again, Amazon.com)
- LibraryThing.com
- Tagging folksonomies what value?
- Public Bibliography
- What is more important for discovery? A book
review or a MARC record? - Linking structure among first class objects is a
central feature of the Web
10Everything 2.0 (Web 2.0, Library 2.0.)
- Bringing people back into the loop through the
use of so-called Social Software - Andrew McAfees SLATES pneumonic
- Search Find what you need, enhanced by emergent
description (see tags, below) - Links link relationships or link ranking
algorithms - Authoring Ease of content creation spare me
the angle brackets, make it bone simple - Tags What do my colleagues call this? I bet it
works better than what the IT department calls it - Extensions If you thought X was good
interesting important useful, you might, by
extension, find Y so - Signals tell me something has changed
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13Extract (and exploit) value in structured data
- Holdings are key who has the item?
- Links to catalogs and virtual reference services
- Enrich the data
- Amazon-like book reviews
- Cover art table of contents (full text?)
- Controlled vocabularies (esp Medicine, law,
sciences) - Folksonomies?
- Classification systems
- Authority control
14Increase integration across boundaries
- The OPAC is becoming irrelevant for end-users
(but remains a local management tool - Solution of last resort for users
- OPACs have less functionality than other
alternatives (Amazoogles) - Weave libraries into the Web
- Drive our services into the open Web
- Unplug Play
- Search engines
- Social software systems
15WorldCat in the Open Web
- WorldCat subsets determined by the search engine
(not the complete database) - On these sites
- Include either of the following with your search
terms - Google "find in a library" (include phrasing
quote marks) - Yahoo! siteworldcatlibraries.org (no space
after colon) - English speakers wont do this can you imagine
speakers of other languages???
16Other WorldCat Partner Sites
- Abebooks (abebooks.com)
- Alibris (alibris.com)
- Amazon.com (amazon.com)
- Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America
(abaa.com) - Biblio (biblio.com)
- BookPage (bookpage.com)
- DirectTextbook (directtextbook.com)
- Google Scholar and Google Books
(scholar.google.com, books.google.com) - Greenwood Publishing Group (greenwood.com)
- HCI Bibliography (hcibib.org)
- Windows Live Academic (academic.live.com)
17Some general principles for technical value
creation in a network environment
- Reduce impediments to search
- Increase integration across boundaries
- Build Network Effect value
- Extract (and exploit) value in structured data
- Increase the efficiency of metadata creation
- Promote participation
- Book reviews
- Linking
- Recommender systems
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24Public Bibliography
- Metadata is expensive
- Cataloging data is important, costly, and
ill-suited to public use (at least for some
aspects of public use) - Mobilizing users to be participants in the
creation of metadata (in the form of book
reviews, recommender services, and linking,
either explicit or inferred) is a potentially
rich source of metadata and linking currency - Amazon is effective at this
- LibraryThing has a strong and growing approach
- Libraries and large cooperative cataloging
agencies are thus far not doing so well.
25Book ReviewsDesirable Characteristics of First
Class Objects
- Book Reviews are (should be) stand-alone First
Class Objects - Harvestable findable by search engines on the
Web - Attributable I want credit
- Linked appropriately to a persistent catalog such
as World or a national catalog - Persistently identified (the identifier is stable
over time) - Curated (the content is stable over time)
26Link Currency
- Linkages are an important currency on the Web
- Who links to you
- Who do you link to
- To rise in relevance rankings, library-managed
links should be persistent and of one form - http//www.worldcat.org/oclc/26160663refererbrie
f_results - http//www.worldcat.org/search?q083890596Xqtowc
_search - http//www.worldcat.org/search?q083890596X
- http//www.worldcat.org/oclc/26160663
- Multiple identifiers are confusing and dilute
link currency.
27Libraries must compare favorably with related
information experiences that our patrons expect
- Discovery and recommender services
- Web 2.0 social network capabilities
- Experiences of comparable commercial service
providers - Last-mile delivery capability
- Bookstore social experience
- Coffee-shop salons
- People to help us navigate the intricacies of a
complicated knowledge space - We are offering an experience as well as a service
28Stuart L. Weibel
Visit me at http//weibel-lines.typepad.com Con
tact me at Stuart.Weibel_at_gmail.com
Thank you for your attention