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The Web and the OPAC - Creating (Library) Value in the Age of the Amazoogles National Autonomous University of Mexico

The 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. OCLC Research. Research and standardization:

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The Web and the OPAC - Creating (Library) Value in the Age of the Amazoogles National Autonomous University of Mexico

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  1. The Web and the OPAC - Creating (Library) Value in the Age of the AmazooglesNational AutonomousUniversity of Mexico 9 October 2006 Stuart L. Weibel Senior Research Scientist, OCLC Research Visiting Scholar, University of Washington iSchool

  2. OCLC 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

  3. What 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

  4. Value 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

  5. Value 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

  6. Value 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 classobjects is a central feature of the Web

  7. The Nancy Pearl Action Figure(complete with shushing action!)

  8. Value 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 classobjects is a central feature of the Web

  9. Everything 2.0 (Web 2.0, Library 2.0….) • Bringing people back into the loop through the use of so-called Social Software: • Andrew McAfee’s 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

  10. Extract (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

  11. Increase 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

  12. WorldCat 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! site:worldcatlibraries.org (no space after colon) • English speakers won’t do this… can you imagine speakers of other languages???

  13. Other 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)

  14. Some 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

  15. Public 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.

  16. Book Reviews:Desirable 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)

  17. Link 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/26160663&referer=brief_results • http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=083890596X&qt=owc_search • http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=083890596X • http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/26160663 • Multiple identifiers are confusing and dilute link currency.

  18. Libraries 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

  19. Stuart L. Weibel Visit me at: http://weibel-lines.typepad.com Contact me at: Stuart.Weibel@gmail.com Thank you for your attention

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