Once again, we at CARE Affiliates are joining with Index Data to offer a series of educational sessions in our booth at ALA. The Index Data/CARE booth will be #466 in the Anaheim Convention Center.

It is important to understand that these seminars are truly intended to be educational in nature, not product sales sessions.  They’re short, about 30-40 minutes and cover a variety of topics at various times.  They will include:

Sharing Stuff — How can we make a living if we give it all away? Mike Taylor, Software Guy, Index Data.   Saturday, June 28th at 11:30am and Sunday, June 29th at 10:30am

Building Solutions the Index Data way. Sebastian Hammer, President, Index Data.  Saturday, June 28th at 2:00pm and Monday, June 30th at 11:30am

“Blowing the doors off metasearch”; Opening up a world of resources to your users. This session will cover OpenTranslators, MasterKey and other technologies you can use.  Carl Grant, President, CARE Affiliates.  Saturday, June 28th at 4:00pm and Monday, June 30th at 9:30am.

Planning for a Repository. This session is designed to introduce concepts to be considered in planning for the implementation of a repository.   Carl Grant, President, CARE Affiliates.  Sunday, June 29th at 12:30pm and Monday, June 30th at 1:30pm

The Universal Search Solution: A Case Study in the Index Data Approach. Come learn how the next generation of metasearch is being built.  Sebastian Hammer, President, Index Data.  Sunday, June 29th at 2:30pm.

If you want to attend a session, please note that seating is limited (8-10 seats). Sending an RSVP to “info (at) care-affiliates.com” will help them ensure adequate seating is provided. We also advise you to stop by our I booth (#466) when you first get to the exhibit floor to see if any last minute changes have occurred in the schedule due to unforeseen circumstances.

We look forward to seeing you there.

“Show me someone who doesn’t dream about the future and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t know where they are going.”

That’s a pretty well known saying about the future and one that is appropriate to a recently announced contest on predicting the future of metasearch, sponsored by the Federated Search Blog.

While most people live in the “today” and think of small enhancements that would make their life and their user’s, use and work-flows easier with today’s products, there are those who dream of the future and what might be possible. This contest is for them (and there’s even some money to be won). It’s a chance to write up their dreams and share them with a much larger audience. The entries will also be judged by a panel of people working in the metasearch /federated search field, including yours truly.

The possibilities are wide open, the vision limited only by imagination. Clearly the writers will need to think about things like:

… Social networks and how to harness that resource

… Cloud and grid computing

… Visualization and vocalization

… Content granularity and recomposition in new forms

… Roles of librarians in federated/metasearching?

… Who will be providing the products/services?

… Where will the metasearch software live?

… Who will the providers be?

The list goes on. But at the end, hopefully we’ll begin to have a better defined view of the future.

As my son grew, up we lived in the middle of the country, and he developed a fondness for the west coast and a desire to live there. I frequently said to him, “you can head out the door and head west and you’ll likely eventually get there. However, if you first get a map and plot your course, you’ll get there sooner and with a lot more accuracy.” This is a chance to help put together that map and plot that course. Let us hear from you. Details are here.

I won’t claim there is anything new in this white-paper by Ingres, but if you’d like to hear what you’ve heard from the small open source vendors in the library market being said by a major corporation with thousands of customers, then you might find this paper provides some level of assurance. (It could also come in handy if you’re trying to convince a Board Member about open source and they give you a blank stare when you say “Index Data“, “Relais“, “CARE“, “LibLime“ or “Equinox“ but at least acknowledge they’ve heard of a company called “Ingres“. Many of the reasons Ingres cites as to why open source is a viable option for all size institutions (all the way up to enterprise level) bears striking similarity to what we’ve said in previous posts. It’s short, to the point and carries some authority. You might find it useful.

One thing you can count on in reading blogs is different perspective. So, today I read two interesting posts, both talking about open source. The first, a blog by Tom Chamberlain, discussed some reasons why open source continues to have a growing presence in the software market. I particularly found myself agreeing when Chamberlain stated:

“The Software Industry is polluted with examples of companies doing more work than they need to by spending money on building things that already exist.”

There are those of us in library automation that have been saying this for quite awhile. We’re too small an industry to have virtually every vendor reinventing what should be shared infrastructure. Again, Chamberlain says it well when he states:

“To give one example, its an enormous waste of money for Microsoft and Apple to both develop lower level functionality to interface with identical hardware. No one buys an OS based on how elegantly it communicates with its serial bus. If these companies agreed to share technology that was identical in both systems they could spend their money competing on the things that consumers actually care about.”

I guess this particularly hit home for me because I remember back to a couple of years ago, organizing a meeting of the other Presidents of the major ILS vendors (well, except one and you can probably guess who that was) at an ALA conference and making this same pitch to them. As I said to them at the time, “if we started with a clean sheet of paper, designing a new ILS system, none of us would come up with what we’re selling right now.” I also pointed out that to reinvent an ILS, from the ground up was a major expenditure that most firms couldn’t and wouldn’t want to bear. So, I made the pitch that we all join together and build that new system, with the core being shared code (either open source, or code controlled by a foundation of which you had to be a member or else you paid a fee to use it). I then made the pitch that each vendor could then focus on developing extensions and add-ons to that base set of shared infrastructure code. To the credit of all the attendees, everyone expressed interest and started listing out problems that would have to be solved for it to work. We all went our ways and then outside forces intervened and companies were sold/combined and some of the people that had sat around that table disappeared from the industry. It was a disappointment but I still believe in the core concept and that’s why I found Chamberlain’s post so interesting.

He goes on to say:

“there will always be parts of software that rely on closed source just as there is still proprietary technology in cars. But I think you’ll eventually see those closed source implementations resting on an Open Source Foundation and the consumer will be better off for it.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Which is why the next post I read by Peter McCracken of Serials Solutions also struck a chord with me. (In the interest of full disclosure, Serials Solutions is a partner of CARE Affiliates). First, let me state that I have great respect for Peter and what he has accomplished in this industry. It’s really very impressive. At the same time, I’m concerned when I read posts like this because it shows there is still much to be understood about open source and the movement behind it. Now, of course, you expect a provider of proprietary based products to strongly defend what they’re doing and to point out the problems of what they might see as an impending threat (after all, Microsoft spends fortunes doing this!). But if we’re assuming forthrightness in what is being said, it misses the following points:

1. Most open source vendors are not telling you that you should use open source because it is free. Of all the ones I deal and interact with, they go out of their way to avoid saying this. What they do say is that you will have:

a. A competitive environment in which to bid costs like software maintenance and development of new features. Therefore, you’ve obtained some protection from price hikes (how about that annual cost-of-living increase? Adds up, doesn’t it?) that seem unreasonable.

b. The ability to have a level of control both over your budget and direction that you don’t have with proprietary software. The library automation industry is itself, littered with systems that were bought and then phased out, often to the dismay of the libraries using them. This simply can’t happen with open source. So, no unexpected budget surprises. Furthermore if your vendor won’t put a feature in your software that you desperately need, or if they as this post claims can happen “sold you some vaporware” — then hire a programmer and get it put in. You can’t easily do that with proprietary software, but you certainly can with open source.

2. Quoting McCracken’s post again:

“One person representing a commercial service pointed out that they would often reply to Requests for Proposals that contained many absolute requirements and when they didn’t win the contract, they’d discover that some open source solution that didn’t meet many of the requirements had been selected. So folks are applying different selection criteria to systems based on their open source-ness. Both Marshall and the vendor said that was a problem.”

I’ll concede this is likely true, but I would submit that the reason this is happening is that the market still hasn’t really figured out how to ask the right questions in their analysis of open source software, in order to quantify/qualify these criteria. Too often that criteria probably resides in the “gut-feel” that this is new, exciting and they should be part of it. At worse it is a reaction to some of what has happened in the software market due to acquisitions and products, customers wanted and/or were using, being aimed for the software scrap yards.

Maybe a better way to address this concern would be to start developing a new set of questions to make for a fair comparison. For example, I’d suggest:

• How many software enhancements do you receive per/year?
• How many are sitting in your queue?
• How many of those actually make it into a new release of the product?
• In what time frame (from the point submitted to the point they’re in the product)?
• At what cost?
• Will you provide the source code to our institution so that we can develop features we need but that your company is unable to do?
• Can we then share those features with other customers?
• Will you assure us our product will not be terminated without our agreement and with minimal financial impact on our budget?

There are more we could list here, but you get my point and you can read my previous posts (here and here) to see topics that need questions developed in order to have a truly fair comparison of open source and proprietary solutions.

The bottom line here is, as I’ve often said, is that open source is NOT, in-and-of-itself, the end goal of library automation. It is a step on the pathway of software development. What it does, what it is leading us to and what everyone needs to understand is that the open source movement is about customer freedom, customer control and the ability to make sure needs of an organization are addressed in the most financially efficient manner possible for that organization. Open source is NOT going to replace proprietary software. It will change it. In order for that maximum efficiency to be realized, we need to move towards a scenario where core infrastructure should be seen as a commodity and should be open source. Proprietary vendors should develop great new features and functionality on top of that code, as the post that started me down this path describes. That will result in the most efficient use of resources by the vendors and far greater efficiency in the markets they serve. The library marketplace is too small to do this any other way.

The folks at TALIS continue to come up with interesting topics for their monthly Library Gang podcasts. This month’s subject was that of Bolt-on OPAC’s those search and discovery tools from both the open source community and proprietary vendors that get installed on top of the existing (and usually different) ILS product.

As I say in the podcast, I think the folks at Aquabrowser deserve a lot of credit here for really shaking up library and vendor thinking about the approach to be taken. Taco Ekkel the Director of Development for Medialab Solutions, who produced Aquabrowser, is guest in this podcast and provides a great deal of background on how the product and how it came to be offered to the library marketplace.

The bottom line on what we’re seeing here is an important development in library automation, where libraries are being provided more choices in meeting the needs of their users and their institutions. While we’ve had some degree of add-on software from other vendors for back-room operations in the past, with this development we’re seeing choices being enabled for user facing modules. This will require more work on the part of vendors to fully enable the functionality of these modules, but the signs here are good and with the professions adoption and encouragement of these new choices, vendors will respond with more enabling support. In my opinion, we still have more to do to move from “bolt-on OPAC’s” to “plug-in OPAC’s”. There are lots of issues to be overcome and many of those get discussed as well.

It’s an interesting podcast and I encourage you to take 45 minutes to listen to it.

Sun Microsystems deserves some recognition and credit for the efforts in bringing attention to an issue that many libraries and librarians have yet to face; that of preserving and archiving all the digital materials libraries are rapidly accumulating. Art Pasquinelli, Education Market Strategist at SUN, has worked closely with Mike Keller, University Librarian at Stanford University to bring together, from around the world, some of the leading thinkers and doers in the field. Two weeks ago, the third meeting of the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group was held in San Francisco and these meeting just keep getting better. Here is some of the press about the meeting that can be read here and here.

Now, of course, the skeptics among you will say; “Well sure Sun is interested in this, they have some hardware they’d like to sell us.” Which is, of course, true, but that minimizes the terrific contribution Sun is making in organizing, helping to sponsor and focusing on a critically important issue to libraries.

Based on my experience, all too often, in talking with libraries about their repository plans, when we get to the subject of how they plan to handle preservation and archiving needs, there is a pause in the conversation. Too many still think that the very act of digitizing is preservation. This is through no fault of their own, it’s just a clear indication of the need for education on the issue and is the reason I want to single out Sun’s efforts for recognition. Because of Sun’s efforts, that education is happening. They’ve done this by identifying on a global basis, those who are carving the pathways, leading the efforts and experimenting with ideas and techniques to ensure that items digitized are, in fact, usable well into the future. They’re bringing these people together to develop best practices that can be shared with the rest of the profession. They’re developing both hardware and releasing open source software to meet the needs that are being identified.

Sun has launched both a website and a WIKI where the work of the PASIG (Preservation & Archiving Special Interest Group) is being documented and further discussions encouraged. There are a number of working groups (Long term storage and data migration, Preservation, Enterprise repositories and federated repositories, Research data repositories and ST5800 based architectures) that have been formed and there is room for both those who are doing things and those who want to learn. The publication page is also worth a visit.

Librarians owe Sun, Art Pasquinelli and Mike Keller a huge thanks for what they’re doing here. While I can’t speak for any of them, I’m pretty sure the best thanks they could get is for you to take them up on the opportunity they’re providing and get involved.

If any of you tried over the past week to access the CARE website and blog you were likely greeted with some error message indicating CARE needed to buy more bandwidth. Well, not exactly. What happened was a lesson for us and so we share it with you.

Last week, we saw some registrations on the blog from users with what appeared to be valid usernames from the gmail domain. I’ll freely admit, I much prefer registrations associated with institutions, but understand many people find gmail quite attractive for good reasons. Unfortunately, some people who register gmail addresses are not on the up-and-up. Such was the case with the registrations we saw last week. Using the ability to comment on the blog, somehow these people hacked into our blog, planted a great deal of malicious code that promptly generated phishing-spam mail and then launched it.

This vicious attack promptly started generating thousands of emails out across the web, appearing to come from our domain and thus generating a massive amount of traffic. We use Network Solutions to host our site and they, thinking we were launching this attack, shut down our site and blog. We were sent a very nasty letter accusing us of this activity and a demand for a letter admitting guilt and the promise never to do it again. The arrival of the letter was our first indication that a problem was happening. We contacted Network Solutions immediately, explaining the situation and the fact that we had been hacked and requesting they restore our site so we could remove the malicious code. This resulted in a multi-day tussle ending up in the executive suite of Network Solutions before we finally achieved assistance in restoring our site.

Once that happened, we quickly found the malicious code and deleted it. If you were one of those who visited our site and wondered what happened we apologize. For those of you who run WordPress blogs and/or websites, you might well know this is not an uncommon occurrence as others have had the same problem. Here are the lessons we learned:

1. Do NOT register your domain and your website hosting with the same company. If you are victimized like we are you don’t even have the option of restoring your website to a different location and redirecting your domain. You are shut down and locked out. Not good for business.

2. Keep full backups of your entire blogging site (keep them back for quite a time period in case the attack is planted, but not launched for awhile).

3. Despite your thought that in using a hosting company for your website, you might think you’re getting a complete infrastructure and security setup, proper firewalling, etc, understand you’re not. They are quick to disclaim responsibility for these items.

4. Linking your blog to your main domain can, in a case like this, result in both being shutdown. We’ll be looking at separating the two in the future.

5. Don’t be naive and believe that your innocent till proven guilty. Our hosting company went straight to the “you’re guilty” until you prove innocence. Aggravating to say the very least, especially when they indicate that “due to the volume of these incidents” it will take them 1-3 days to review your situation. That would seem to indicate to me a number of different assumptions should be made, but I’ll leave that be for the moment.

This was not a fun experience. We hope by sharing this, you can avoid some of the pain and aggravation if it happens to you.

All in all, some very painful lessons, but we leave the situation much better informed. I hope in reading this, you’ll do the same.

Yes, no doubt about it, I’ve been neglectful of my blog recently. It isn’t because I wanted to be, it’s just a matter of “stuffing 10 pounds in a 5 pound sack”. CARE Affiliates has been a busy operation. It also isn’t because I haven’t been writing, because I have. Just this week Sol Lederman, author of the FederatedSearchBlog posted a review I wrote about a chapter in a new book that covers using RFP’s to purchase federated search systems. I’ve long been critical of the way this profession uses RFP’s. I’ve published an article on the topic before that while now in need of updating, still outlines substantial costs and problems with these tools. I’ve suggested an approach in another article I co-published. At least one company has been formed to try and address the problem for this profession. Yet, until it gets focus on a much wider level, they’ll continue to remain a costly and inefficient purchasing tool. Everyone agrees they’re painful. I guess not yet painful enough to really do anything about it.

My respect for Walt Crawford is older than many librarians in the field today and therefore I’m pleased that he found my post about OpenLibrarianship interesting and thought provoking. He reposted it on the Palinet/PLN site, did some polishing on it (Thanks Walt, although I did intend to run Open and Librarianship together, thus creating one new word: OpenLibrarianship!). He then added this comment which I repost here:

Interesting possibilities within a flawed framework — Walt Crawford 13:06, 20 March 2008 (EDT)

On one hand, I agree with Grant’s belief that libraries can gain through–and need–more two-way involvement with their communities. Sometimes that notion goes under an existing name, “Library 2.0,” and that’s a version of Library 2.0 I heartily endorse. (Indeed, maybe “Library 2.0″ is all the name we need for what Grant calls OpenLibrarianship. Odd to see myself writing that!)

On the other, I’ve long argued that “information” is a narrow and misleading term as the primary focus of librarianship, particularly for public libraries, and that the role of public libraries in organizing and providing stories (fiction and nonfiction) continues to be important. Longer stories still work best in book form, and the role of public libraries as places of books continues to be vital now and for the future, regardless of the growth of “digital content.” I’m not ready to dismiss those roles or regard them as trivial compared to “information.”

That said, some of Grant’s suggestions are only feasible for relatively large libraries–and the community focus of smaller and rural libraries is a great strength of American libraries. But I think they’re all worth discussing, even if I wouldn’t get behind some of them.

I would also note that getting active community involvement isn’t always easy, as the proprietors of library blogs and catalogs that invite patron reviews and tagging can attest.

Oh, and as for Maurice Line’s gloomy forecast? Maybe it’s worth noting that the article cited is a reprint of a talk Line gave…in 1983. (Thanks to Andrew Pace’s post “An unerring eye for the inessential.”)

After reading his comments, and in the spirit of this political season, there are a few points I’d like to discuss:

First, I think it is important to note that I did not advocate anywhere that libraries close their physical locations nor stop their role as disseminators of “stories”. I’m every bit as much a believer in libraries as Walt and, in fact, admire his writings on this topic (I find they do give balance). However, I will say that I think those in the library profession define “Information” way too narrowly. Is it not possible to view libraries as information pathways to the discovery of resources whether they’re physical or digital? While some people will still go to physical libraries, the newer generations are spending far more times on their computer driven devices than in physical libraries. In the digital world, the way people will find those “stories” will be via digital information. Plus, where does it say that information is only non-fiction? Is a digital representation of a fiction book a story or information? When we do print-on-demand of a digital fiction work, have we delivered a story or information? Again, if we accept a community definition of the term, we can go to Wikipedia and find information described as:

“Information as a concept bears a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. Generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation (emphasis added)”.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t always think the same as other librarians (even though I am one). But I personally can (and do) find plenty of room in that definition to encompass both fiction and non-fiction, digital and analog.

Secondly, are my suggestions only feasible for large libraries? Again, maybe that’s true within traditional thinking about libraries. But I would argue, as I did in the original post, that the concepts of community apply here and that by libraries involving the larger community of users in collaborative ways, these ideas become achievable. Too much of the thinking of librarians is still within silos today. Tearing down those silos and embracing these community forces (which sometimes exist, in part, within the current national professional organizations and associations) and honed with some focus, could achieve a huge amount of what I proposed as starting ideas. The key to making things feasible is, as always, not to look for ways to make excuses for not achieving them, but to find new pathways to achieve them. One of the points of the post is to hopefully awaken us to the fact that we now have new pathways available.

Third, as for why can’t we achieve “active community involvement” with libraries? I would strongly advocate that this is precisely because we’ve not yet seized this new opportunity to reposition ourselves on the digital landscape and thus, have slipped from the view of those who are most active on that frontier. If you want bloggers to comment and OPAC users to review, then you have to make your location one that draws attention, not only from them, but their peers. Let’s remember, it is about community. They won’t participate in these locations if they don’t perceive that this is where the community is located, because part of what they want in return for their participation is the sharing, the collaboration and the exchange of ideas that happens when that exists. It is also important to realize that with the generations, come inherent behavioral patterns, thus we have “Baby-Boomers”, “Gen-Xer’s” and now “Millienials” each who behave very differently. I saw a recent library survey done at the University of Alberta and the one fact that caught my eye was that the average responders age was 44 years of age (on a college campus!). Hmmmm. What do you think the average age is for the user of Facebook (34, according to this site), MySpace or even Amazon? This is precisely why I say you have to extend your library services into these new frontiers to reach new communities of users. If we’re expecting the Baby-Boomers and average library users to suddenly behave like Millenials, I think we’re deluding ourselves. Libraries need to change, need to embrace community and therefore meet these newer generations on their own turf if we want these newer generations to embrace libraries and librarianship in return.

Finally, while I very much admire Walt’s pithy point on Maurice Line’s forecast, I do think we need to consider a few additional things; a) Just last year in October, the Future Exploration Network and What’s Next groups developed an extinction timeline that shows libraries being extinct by the year 2019. So, this forecast hasn’t gone away, b) Libraries, in one form or another, have been around for at least 4,000 years, dating back to roots in the Mesopotamia times and regions. When talking about something that has existed 4,000 years or so, a forecast, whether dating 25 years in age or just last October, is still fresh material when properly placed in perspective. Of course, on the other hand, you could say if we’ve been around that long, we’re not likely to disappear anytime soon. However, much of this misses the overall point of the post, which is not so much to say that I think libraries will disappear, but more it is a question of what form libraries will exist in going forward. I frequently look at the path libraries are on and wonder if archival functions are the future. The ultimate point of the post is to simply say that we have new tools in our toolbox and that by embracing these, we can engage in the new shapes and flows of societal forces and that by layering those forces on information (including “stories” in my definition) librarianship could hold a far more vibrant and important role.

The newest podcast from the Library 2.0 Gang is now available at a couple of sites (Library Journal and TALIS. I’ll be adding it to the CARE website when I next update the site).

This was an interesting podcast to participate in with the topics largely inspired by the recent COD4LIB Conference held in Portland. The guest participant was Aaron Swartz from The Open Library, a fascinating project that everyone in the library profession should watch. ( I found it quite interesting and it became the inspiration for a talk I gave at a conference in Connecticut and subsequently, a separate post ).

We also talked about the DLF’s ILS API effort and a variety of new cataloging topics. Sharing ideas in the podcast are some very interesting folks, including: John Blyberg, Nicole C. Engard, Char Booth, and Rob Styles. I encourage you to listen to it and as I mentioned in a previous blog post, please share your reactions, comments, ideas for new topics, etc. Any of the participants would be very pleased to hear from you.