Category Archives: endeavor information systems

Applying new lipstick on an old pig

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One of my work responsibilities is to maintain the Voyager integrated library system from Ex Libris. A new release (7.0) is now available and one of the features that is getting the most publicity is the new web interface to the catalog. It features dramatic architectural and feature improvements from its predecessor, as well as adding new features that weren’t possible before. The Voyager product manager and folks from Ex Libris customer support have posted several enthusiastic reports on new features to come on the Voyager discussion list (closed to customers only), and I think they are doing a fairly good job of trying to build excitement. Except that all that I’ve heard and seen so far leaves me cold.

Why? Well, although I definitely agree that there is much to like about the new interface, it’s not really that new. During my last stint at what was then Endeavor Information Systems three years ago, I participated in user studies at some existing Voyager customer sites that were based this same interface. The functionality and changes I see in the Voyager 7.0 web interface (a.k.a. WebVoyage) were all designed and finalized, as far as I can tell, three years ago. That’s light years in technology time.

Worse still, the things that are so “exciting” about this new interface (persistent URLs! WHoooHeee! — different “skins”! Oh my! — a truly simple, Google-like basic search! Isn’t that original!) are features that have been available and taken for granted in other systems for years. And they are ones that in some cases have been implemented better than what I have seen so far in Ex Libris’s Voyager offering.

Sorry, but this is just a new flavor of lipstick applied to an old pig. It would take a lot more than this to get me excited about this particular product again.

The "dark side" discussion [Updated]

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The main reason I was able to go to NASIG this year was that Anne McKee, program officer for the Greater Western Library Alliance (apparently known as GWLA, pronounced “Gwilla”), kindly invited me to participate in a panel discussion about alternative library careers for serialists. I jumped at the chance to present with friends and colleagues including Anne, Christine Stamison, Beverley Geer, Mike Markwith, and Bob Schatz. Anne represented consortia (the aformentioned GWLA), Christine brought the perspective of working for a subscription agent (Swets), Beverley with a journal publisher (Sage), Mike had a subscription agent (WT Cox) as well as PAMS1 background (TDNet), Bob represented book vendors (Coutts), and I came with a background working for a ILS vendor (Endeavor Information Systems, Inc., now Ex Libris Group) and in a corporate library.

Each of us limited our remarks to 7-8 minutes at Anne’s request in order to maximize the question and answer time with the audience, which numbered around 150 people. That isn’t much time to both describe our backgrounds, why we made the career decisions that we did, and offer pertinent advice as to what it takes to work in an alternative library career.

If you’ve been in the world of libraries for any length of time you will know quite well that there are persistent stereotypes and divisions between various forms of librarianship. For instance, cataloging people and acquisitions people are always supposedly against each other, public services conflicts with technical services, professional librarians and paraprofessionals, and on and on. One of the deepest rooted of these is the continual reference to the “dark side” — meaning, working in the for profit sector. There are many people in this profession who feel that theirs is a higher, better calling if they work in a public or academic library, i.e. a non profit environment. Often there is a lack of respect shown to those who “dare” to look for better wages and sometimes more challenging work in the business world. (Thus the reference to the “dark side.”)

This session, then, was an opportunity to highlight some of the many positives, and negatives, about working for a vendor and in other alternative situations.

One of the things that came up during everyone’s presentations as well as during the Q&A session afterward, was this issue of the “dark side.” I think the highlight of the entire session was when Eve Davis, who works for EBSCO, stated: “We joke about the divide, yet we seem to be perpetuating that very thing by mentioning it so often. Why don’t we stop using terms like ‘the dark side’ even in jest?”

[Updated June 11, 2007: I realized after I had posted this that my narrative just ended without going into any further detail about the session's content, so what follows is what I meant to write originally.]

Here are some of the impressions or things I especially recall from what other presenters had to say:

  • Several mentions by those on the panel of having a sense of impatience with the status quo. I thought this was interesting and noteworthy. Christine Stamison, for instance, talked about the process of implementing a new serials check-in form via a committee at The University of Chicago Library, and how that discussion took six months to come to a resolution. If I recall, she made some quip about how difficult it was to “turn the Queen Mary around.” I worked with Christine in the same environment and I can attest to the truthfulness of this observation. Sometimes things change too quickly in the for profit world, but it seems like all of the presenters preferred a faster pace of change and fewer meetings.
  • Anne, Christine, Beverley, Mike, and Bob all spoke about the supposed glamour of travel, how it really wasn’t that glamorous after all. Mike illustrated this by mentioning the number of times he warmed his McDonald’s hamburger on top of his hotel room’s TV set. Christine mentioned the fact that this kind of work life can be really lonely, and that you have to have a strong sense of self, that you have to really like who you are. Bob mentioned how much he regrets that travel takes away from time with his family.
  • MLS as union card. Beverley made this point, that in her view, the library degree is nothing more than a union card. That doesn’t mean it has no value (Anne also made this point); on the contrary, it establishes important common ground with clients. All of us agreed that we are librarians first and foremost. Anne mentioned, for example, filling out paperwork for her children’s school where she was asked to state her profession, and that she always answers the question with ‘librarian.’
  • It was funny to learn that Bob’s first job out of library school was at a taco shack of some sort in Oregon (his home state).
  • Support for professional involvement. Everyone on the panel agreed that they receive strong support for professional involvement from their employers. In some cases (and this has been my personal experience), such support is often stronger than what we would have received in an academic or public library. Christine mentioned that she requires everyone who reports to her to become NASIG members and to attend the conference each year.

Some of the points that I tried to make in my portion of the session:

  • Be sure to build a record of accomplishment. Then be willing and able to articulate what you’ve done and how it benefits you in various situations. What I was thinking of here, but failed to say explicitly, was the need for project management skills. That is huge. In every job I’ve ever held, the ability to plan and execute projects has been critical.
  • It’s not all about money. Yes, the grass is almost always greener on the for profit side of the fence. I pointed out that this was a motivating factor for seeking a job on “the dark side” (and I think this is true of the other panelists as well) but that it was far more important for me to have work that is challenging, fulfilling, and where I learn new things every day.
  • It is really important to be a quick study, meaning, be willing to learn and learn quickly. I pointed out that many of the jobs I’ve held were ones for which I had no prior background, but that I was able to succeed in them because of working hard to learn all necessary skills.
  • Have specific career goals in mind. Review them regularly, and understand that they may change over time. The example I gave was the difference in my career made by becoming a husband and father. When I was single, I devoted 95% of my time and energy to my career. Now that I have a family, they take precedence.

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1 PAMS refers to Publication Access Management System, a class of vendor-supplied services that helps libraries manage the e-content to which they provide access.

Usefulness of Meebo

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I’ve had a MeeboMe widget in place on the sidebar of this blog for a while without much traffic or contact from others. Recently however, some brave souls have begun to initiate contact in order to let me know what they think of FML. Usually I have no idea who they are, but I really appreciate these chats and enjoy the instant interaction that having this handy little widget provides. A more subtle form of interaction comes when I can see whether someone is actually visiting the site based upon the existence of a Meebo “guest” user. This information shows up as long as I am signed into Meebo at the same time as someone visits my site. It is rare to have more than one “guest” show up in my Meebo IM list — I think the all-time high for simultaneous “guests” was something like five or six, after I posted comments on the then-pending merger between Endeavor and Ex Libris.

Overall, Meebo is an excellent tool and I highly recommend it.

Merger fallout

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Last week about 45 employees from Endeavor lost their jobs as a result of the merger with Ex Libris. Among them are friends and former co-workers. I am not surprised that some were laid off; what surprises me is why some were laid off and others kept their jobs. Some who kept their jobs don’t deserve it, in my opinion.

What else is clear from the merger is that not much aside from Voyager will be retained in terms of products from the Endeavor side of the equation. It appears that for example, Meridian customers will be migrated to Verde; Discovery: Resolver customers will be migrated to SFX; and Discovery: Search customers will be migrated to MetaLib. At least that is my understanding at this stage. Oh, I forgot: There is one other Endeavor product that appears to have staying power: Journals Onsite. I suppose the installed user community for that product as well as for Voyager was just too strong to ignore or alienate.

It is a weird situation. I’m still getting used to saying ‘Ex Libris’ instead of ‘Endeavor.’ I wonder how many customer libraries will actually migrate to new products at a time when many are already overstretched in terms of time and resources devoted to complex information management systems. I wonder about those employees from Endeavor who remain and how they will manage the transition and uncertainty, and the same thing from the Ex Libris side. Time will tell.

Selfishly I am thankful I was able to leave Endeavor when I did, and I am thankful to have a job, period.

A quick conference trip to Washington, D.C.

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For the past few days I’ve been on a quick conference trip to a meeting in the Washington, D.C. area. The meeting was organized by NISO and was entitled “From Discovery to Delivery: Solutions to Put Your Content Where the Users Are.”

While there was nothing new or startlingly different about the content of the meeting, for me, at least, I think it was a worthwhile trip overall. The best part of the whole workshop was attending Dan Chudnov’s presentation on “COinS, unAPI, and a Plan for Zero Configuration Service Discovery.” Dan is a great speaker; humorous yet thorough, with an ability to easily explain some pretty technical stuff in a way that most people can understand. I was not surprised to see that he uses a Mac (way to go Mac lovers!) and I liked his use of Keynote for his presentation. The transition theme he used seemed to bother a few people and one person loudly remarked with a sneer, “Looks like a Mac application.” (Get a life, Windows lovers.) What I particularly liked about the approach Dan took with his talk was that he made it Lego-like, that is, piece built upon piece built upon piece, until he reached the (pardon the pun) piece-de-resistance, zero configuration service discovery. His vision for making things completely simple for users, with no configuration necessary for them and no need for them to know about the technical magic that lies behind the user experience, is truly invigorating. The basic focus he had was on using OpenURL and combining it with several other “off-the-shelf” standards to make it dead easy for users to navigate to resources they need. One of the technologies he highlighted was Apple’s excellent Bonjour application for auto-discovery of networked resources such as websites or printers. He also brought up the example of Apple’s iTunes and how it easily allows users on the same network to discover and then play shared music libraries. Overall, this was a great presentation and I am very thankful we have someone of Dan’s caliber to push the technological boundaries in our profession. I wanted to introduce myself to him but didn’t get to do that before the end of the meeting.

Andrew Pace of the Technically Speaking column in American Libraries and author of the Hectic Pace blog, was also in attendance and it was the first time I had seen him in person and heard his by now well-travelled talk about what NCSU has done with its Endeca-powered online catalog. Andrew also is an engaging speaker. I didn’t learn much that I didn’t already know about the work he and others have done but it was interesting to have it presented in person anyway. I wish that I could have spoken with him and others there about the work I am involved in regarding integration of my library’s online catalog with another commercial search engine, work that I think might be interesting to others because it makes new uses of library data that are different than what I have heard is being done anywhere else.

A third highlight of the event was a presentation from someone from the National Academies Press who talked about the challenges and changes they have implemented in providing improved resource discovery for materials they publish. Michael Jon Jensen gave the presentation and he is their Director of Web Communications for the National Academies and Director of Publishing Technologies for National Academies Press. Under his direction this entity has done some really interesting experimentation and development of ways to improve access to the 3,600 books they publish, including development of their own clustering results. One of the things he said that most stood out to me was that National Academies Press provides their books for free in HTML form but they charge for PDF versions. The reason for charging for PDF is that, as he put it, our society still values and treasures the framework and “ethos” of the printed book. Those aren’t his exact words but I think it captures the idea he put forward. He said that a printed book is worth more than the individual pieces, it is bigger and better as a whole collection contained in one package. I thought this to be a very interesting perspective that has important ramifications for how we present and deliver information in an increasingly e-only world.

Jane Burke, former CEO at Endeavor and someone with whom I have always gotten along, was also there as a presenter and it was nice to chat with her for a while and to hear how she is doing in her job leading Serials Solutions.

Finally what made the trip special was the chance to catch up with old friends, Janet Lee-Smeltzer and Tom Wilson. Janet works at UMBC and Tom worked until recently at University of Maryland, College Park. Each night they picked me up from my hotel and we had dinner together and talked far into the evening about librarianship, Web/Library 2.0, library politics, and many other topics.

A welcome reprieve

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Today was my last day at Endeavor. It’s a welcome reprieve! I had been wondering what could occupy my time ’til my original end date (the 17th). Now, I don’t have that worry and it’s like a big load has been taken away. I get to spend needed time on preparing for my upcoming class, plus Michele and I now have the time we need to look for (and hopefully buy) the right house in the right area. On top of all of that, we now have time to do some special, fun things as a family, sort of like a mini-vacation, before I start my new job.

There are many nice people at Endeavor for whom it was sad to say goodbye. But we’ll likely keep in touch and bump into one another at some future EndUser.

Now, it’s time to get the little ones to bed.

Fascinated with flying

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I’ve long been fascinated with passenger jets and the whole flying experience, so it was with keen interest that I’ve read as much as possible about the decades-long knock-’em-drag-out fight between Airbus and Boeing over who will truly dominate the skies. I have to admit to being partial to Boeing. Sort of like rooting for the home team, even if, at times, they are sleazy and don’t deserve to win. When I first read about the upcoming so-called “super jumbo” jet, the A350, being built by Airbus, I honestly thought that the war was over and that Airbus had won. It is an amazing machine and I can’t wait to see it and perhaps fly in it some day.

However I have been really intrigued by Boeing’s latest offering, the 787 Dreamliner, and note that it is already unbelievably successful in terms of sales, even though it won’t go into service until 2008 at the earliest. (I think the A350 goes into service in 2007.) They aren’t really competitors in terms of the markets they serve but they represent the two biggest weapons in each camp, and they offer completely different views of how the industry will change in the next 10-20 years. Today’s article in the New York Times (Boeing Bets the House on Its 787 Dreamliner – New York Times) is an excellent article that discusses Boeing’s big gamble on the 787. This and other recent news about the 787 and the very positive reaction it is receiving from airlines has convinced me that the “war” is certainly not over. Like the A350, I can’t wait to see my first 787 fly overhead a couple of years from now, much less have a chance to fly in one. My current favorite jet in which to fly is the 777, which is a great plane, I think.

As an aside, one of the things I like most about where I currently work is that Endeavor’s headquarters are literally next door to O’Hare Airport here in Chicago. Passenger jets of all types and from all over the world fly over the building at close range, offering me the chance to take a look at them and try to identify what kind of jets they are and from which airlines. I know, it sounds a bit childish, but who cares. I think it’s a fun and innocent, if quirky, pasttime.

My big news

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My big news is that I will shortly begin a new job. Yesterday I accepted a job offer from one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, to manage their library’s systems as well as their technical services operation. I am really excited about this opportunity. I’ve worked for two large, academic research libraries, for a small college library, and for a library systems vendor. Now I will find out what it’s like to work in a corporate library environment. I submitted my resignation today at Endeavor Information Systems, Inc., and my last day there will be May 17. I start my new job on May 22. In the new job I will still be tied somewhat to Endeavor but in a new and different way. This corporate library uses most of Endeavor’s software products, including Voyager (a traditional integrated library system consisting of an online catalog and other stuff), Meridian (their electronic resources management system, or ERMS), Discovery: Finder (formerly, ENCompass for Resource Access, which is a federated search tool), and Discovery: Resolver (formerly, LinkFinderPlus, Endeavor’s OpenURL service).

This opportunity is a real answer to prayer. Now my family and I have a sense of direction, of where we’re going in the coming months. It’s going to be pretty stressful because we will be looking for a new home, a new community to live in, and moving again. At the same time I will be starting a new job, teaching a graduate course, and finishing up a book chapter.

EndUser 2006 notes on opening session [Updated]

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[Through a series of missteps that I won't go into here, I discovered that I had accidentally deleted this post, first published a few weeks ago. I feel pretty dumb. When I figured out what happened, I sat here, stunned, wondering what to do. Then I remembered Google's good 'ol caching capability, did a quick search to call up the cached version of this post, did a quick copy and paste, and voila, problem solved. Well, almost. My error wiped out the original post entirely, meaning that it automatically broke the link to that post, as well. There's nothing I can do about that. In the process of reconstituting the content, I decided on some editorial tweaks throughout.]

(Warning, this is a pretty lengthy post.)

Yesterday was the start of EndUser 2006, Endeavor’s customer conference. Somewhere around 1,000 customers have shown up for this event, some coming from as far away as Australia, New Zealand, several European countries, as well as Canada, Latin America, and of course, the U.S. As I’ve noted before, there are several conference sessions dealing with topics of interest, but yesterday’s highlight was the opening general session featuring a representative from Google who spoke in depth about Google’s Book Search project. Tom Turvey, Head, Google Book Search Partnerships, gave a brief over of Google and how it makes money, defined the elements of Google Book Search, described the Google Book Search Partner Program (which he oversees), and finally discussed the Library Program portion of Google Book Search. Tom has a long history of working with online content, serving in numerous roles in the publishing industry relating to online delivery, including launching Barnes & Noble’s ebook offerings and most recently holding a senior post at HarperCollins.

Tom began by describing Google’s business. He mentioned that Google now provides 59% of all Internet search referrals. Google’s oft-repeated mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Their Its core business, i.e. how they the company makes money, is from advertising revenue generated via paid search ads using Google AdSense. Tom also mentioned that Google is the leader, by far, in referrals to book sites (currently it processes about 60% of all such referrals). In describing Google’s business, Tom pointed out some interesting statistics about book purchasing. He provided statistics showing that 13% Thirteen percent of all book purchases are now done online; schools/libraries make up about 24% of the book buying market, direct to consumer purchasing (direct from publishers) is about 2%; and the biggest growth area recently has been in non bookstore retail (books being purchased in Costco, Sam’s Club, Wal-Mart, etc.).

The next portion of the presentation focused on an explanation of Google Book Search. Tom pointed out that in his experience, never has there been so much misinformation about a product as there has been with Google Book Search (GBS). He made some comment that 90% of what has been published in the news media is false, thus the importance of explaining exactly what it’s about. GBS, at its heart, is an attempt to associate book content with what searchers are looking for in search engines. There are two main parts to GBS: the Partner Program, and the Library Program. The Partner Program involves relationships and agreements between Google and publishers. GBS launched in October 2004 at the Frankfort Book Fair. As of now there are literally thousands of publisher partners spanning seven languages. One of the most frequent questions publishers ask Google is, what books are good choices for discovery via GBS? One of Tom’s funnier statements was “we don’t need to help Harry Potter find an audience.” What Google is mostly interested in is the arcane, the obscure, and bringing this material to light via searching GBS. Every page is searchable; users are searching books from cover to cover. There are two ways of providing search on book content: a dedicated search (books.google.com), and integrating book content within the general Google search. The main intent of working with publishers is to drive book sales. Content is protected in a variety of ways (Tom mentioned that as you can imagine, this element of agreements with publishers often gets “into the weeds”). Only 20% of a book is viewable by one user during the course of a month. Print, copy, and save are disabled. Scanned images are purposely low resolution. Publishers can add/remote remove their material at any time. There is page level security as well. A percentage of pages is never visible at one time. Google’s process for receiving publisher content is pretty straightforward: the publisher usually sends either a PDF or a print copy. If the latter, Google digitizes it. As an interesting aside to closing out this portion of the talk, Tom mentioned “Oh by the way, the five publishers who are suing Google over the Library Project are actually members of the Partner Program.”

In turning to the third and last portion of the presentation, Tom outlined the elements of the Library Project. Partner libraries, as most people are aware by now, include Stanford, NYPL, Oxford, Michigan, and Harvard. In researching and comparing collections from each partner library, Google discovered that 60% of books are held in only one of the partner libraries. For legal and other issues, Google began the project by focusing on public domain books. However, public domain books make up only about 20% of a typical library collection. Ten percent of a typical collection is made up of books that are still in print (i.e. the stuff that is handled via the Partner Program). Most books, 90%, are in print but in a fuzzy area in which they may be out of print but still in copyright, or perhaps out of copyright. Seventy percent of collections were published after 1923 and fall into three categories: in copyright, in public domain, or the rights may have reverted. Obviously Google needed to figure out how to solve or address these complexities. Their solution was to offer to scan everything but provide three views: sample pages (partner view), snippet view (book under copyright w/out agreement with a publisher partner), and full book view (book is in public domain). The snippet view means that the full text of each book is indexed; users can only view three snippets from the book; there are links to “buy this book” as well as “find in a library”; different categories of books are handled in different ways; and copyright holders may opt out of display and/or scanning.

Obviously a critical factor for Google is optimizing and streamlining the workflow. For example, a key consideration was figuring out how long it takes to scan a typical book. Tom mentioned that in the early days of the project, founder Larry Brin and another staff member would use a metronome to time each other over and over again as they tried to figure out how best to scan a book. (Why a metronome? I have no idea and neither did Tom.) Books are scanned as is, including scribbles, marginalia, notes, whatever. Google is aiming to build a comprehensive collection of indexed books but has a long way to go yet on achieving that goal. Some of the challenges they face on a daily basis are 100% OCR accuracy, 100% image quality, search and integration with web search, the accuracy of any affiliated metadata, the existence of lots of “edge cases” in terms of how to process and display the scanned results, how to address books that contain multiple languages and/or scripts; and how best to achieve a good level of speed/automation of the entire process. As with their much vaunted (and top secret) search algorithms, Google is constantly tweaking the process to try to improve the quality. How do they handle math formulas, spelling correction (Tom used the example of vernacular language that is meant to be spelled a certain way but which looks wrong to a typical spell checker), etc.? What is the best way to deal with automated metadata extraction? Can they figure out an automated way to detect (and appropriately handle) different languages and/or scripts?

Tom made a big point of the fact that Google is actively engaging the library community. Librarians tell Google the good and the bad about GBS (e.g. of bad: too overwhelming for users, hard to know which stuff is authoritative and what is junk, desire to know exactly how the process for scanning and indexing works). Google wants to ensure that GBS works for libraries by making information more discoverable, driving more library usage, and supporting a worldwide community, which is especially relevant for remote and distributed library users. Google has no desire whatsoever to put libraries out of business; in fact, Tom claims that the opposite is true.

[One of the things that I thought was particularly striking was that at one point during the session, Mr. Turvey asked for a show of hands from the audience of those people who were aware of the facts and details he had provided about Google Book Search. To my astonishment, I was one of the few people to raise their hands. Maybe this was just due to some people not fully understanding the question or to some people's innate shyness, who knows. But if it was an indicator of professional ignorance of these matters, then we're in big trouble.]

After concluding his prepared remarks, Tom invited the audience to pose questions. This was perhaps the most interesting portion of the session and Tom handled the questions with aplomb and a dose of wit. Below are my notes of the substance of some of the questions posed, followed by the substance of what I could jot down of Tom’s answers.

Question: When a user sees a link to “find in a library” which leads to Open WorldCat, what librarians want is to have that user come to us rather than use Google and/or buy the book from the publisher. What is your view on this?
Answer: It appears that this is in fact what is happening. Logs show that adding the “find in a library” link, directed to Open WorldCat, has driven a tremendous growth in traffic to WorldCat. Presumably this leads to higher library use.

Question: I’d like to see much more powerful search options, including things like truncation, proximity searching, and boolean capabilities. Is this something Google is considering?
Answer: That’s a very good question, what I’d expect from a librarian <laughter from the audience>. Some of these capabilities are things we are indeed working on, while some of them are already available via the Advanced Search option.

Question: I believe that in search results from publisher content, there is no link to “find in a library” when there is such a link provided in the library search. Why is that?
Answer: Good question. Remember that the goal of GBS is to have a relevant search. The vast majority of books available in GBS at this time are from publishers. Over the next few years, that proportion will flip to emphasize library-owned material. Honestly there is a constant tug and pull between publishers and Google over this issue of how to direct users. Publishers, obviously, participate in GBS to sell more books.

Question: Is there any plan to include Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) as part of the GBS search?
Answer: LCSH and other taxonomies are already used to some extent behind the scenes to assist with determining relevance as well as identifying relationships between books (linking from one book to a related book).

Question: Can you speak about why you are being sued by some of your publisher partners?
Answer: Attorneys love it when you talk publicly about their litigation <much laughter from audience>. Seriously, though, no, I can’t answer that.

Question: Are you indexing each book cover to cover (i.e. full text)? How do you determine relevancy? [Editorial aside: Was this person paying attention? This question was clearly answered in the context of the presentation.]
Answer: Yes, we are doing full text. The ranking/relevancy algorithms used in GBS are pretty much the same as those used in the regular Google search. Some tweaking is of course necessary to make the algorithms relevant for book search. We do user interface testing every month and as a result, we constantly tweak/change the algorithms.

Question: Do you have a formal digital preservation strategy?
Answer: We have agreements with our library partners that cover preservation to whatever degree they have specified in their legal agreements. It really depends on what partner libraries want. Other than that, no, we do not have a formal preservation strategy and do not feel that that is a role we should assume.

Question: Elaborate on how relevant metadata is in GBS.
Answer: Well, first of all, metadata does play a role in GBS but our bias is always toward full text, with metadata/abstracts thought of as secondary. This is probably the opposite of how most libraries would prioritize things.

Question: I have a question on the issue of fair use. Are you working to expand the concept of fair use in terms of scholarly material in particular?
Answer: We feel that our stance on fair use and GBS is very, very significant. We do not have any formal focus on scholarly material in GBS, though.

Question: What is Google’s stance toward the Open Content Alliance? Does Google view them as partners, or competitors?
Answer: We have an open door, a desire to partner and share in digitizing material. We believe that initiatives such as the Open Content Alliance are worthy of our support. However, as you can imagine, there are certain complexities and a lot of politics involved in this kind of interaction. We want to participate in initiatives like this in as open a way as possible.

Question: “Find in a library” links only to WorldCat at present. Does Google have any plans for directing traffic to other bibliographic (i.e. library) databases (this is particularly important for those libraries who aren’t linked from WorldCat)?
Answer: We’d be interested in any other worthwhile bibliographic databases, but WorldCat is it for now.

Question: A single search box is very attractive, but when you expand your data sources (as Google is doing), the simplicity and relevance of this one search become more difficult to maintain. How do you handle this?
Answer: We constantly reevaluate the one box concept and it is an ongoing problem to solve. There is no ready answer.

Question: How do you handle materials from publishers once those materials have gone out of print?
Answer: Good question. Once a publisher’s book goes out of print, they request that it be removed from the index and then it no longer appears in the search. The exception to this would be if there happens to be a copy of that same book that has been scanned and indexed as part of the Library Project. In that case, the book would remain in the index.

Question: Do you have plans for providing regional Google book searches (e.g. one for New Zealand imprints)? This is important for those outside of the U.S. because currently there is such a predominance of U.S. imprints in GBS.
Answer: We already do this, e.g. currently we have 65 regional book searches.

Question: The exposure from GBS for libraries is great, but it needs to be more two way, e.g. to direct users looking for material in a local library catalog to GBS and/or elsewhere. Are there any plans to extend the Google API to be used by libraries for integration into their online catalogs?
Answer: Something like this functionality is present in Google Scholar. We are very happy with this integration with library services and we want to figure out ways to extend this further.

Question: What’s your view on library’s development of customized Greasemonkey scripts to integrate library results in with GBS?
Answer: Anything that doesn’t violate copyright, we’re all for.

Question: GBS is very exciting. What about developing Google Journals?
Answer: <tongue in cheek> …So we have this thing called Google Scholar…Actually we are working ways to better integrate or link between GBS and Google Scholar.

Question: There is clearly a balance of power issue relating to the premise that allowing Google to do all this scanning and digitizing of book content puts the burden of proof on the content creator rather than the user. What are your thoughts about this?
Answer: We believe that this is a very important issue and our stance on this hinges on the belief that we are simply being consistent between the indexing of website content and indexing the content of books.

Question: What about working to include government documents, because they do no present a copyright problem?
Answer: Yes, we have a team devoted to this very issue. It is a bigger challenge to do this than it may at first appear because in order to do it we need to work out who is responsible (i.e. the publisher) of the multitude of gov docs. Expect progress on this front.

Ex Libris adds social web features

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I was glad to see an announcement that Ex Libris has added social web features into its latest release for Aleph 500, its integrated library system. (Seen via Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog.) I wish that this was something Endeavor Information Systems and other library systems vendors in the research and academic library marketplace were more proactive about including in their systems instead of leaving it to savvy users to create this stuff on their own. Or at least actively encourage user development of stuff like RSS feeds, tagging, etc.