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

Programs and research 2 The network rewrites behaviors

Programs and research 3 A few things….  Workflow and Attention  Aggregation of demand and suppy: the long tail

Programs and research 4 ~18 months old No FaceBook, MySpace Library?

Programs and research 5 University of Minnesota

Programs and research 6 Database > website > workflow Prefabricated (e.g. CMS) Self assembled digital identity Netvibes, onfolio, my yahoo, myspace, RSS aggregator, …

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8 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

Programs and research 9 Attention  Then  Resources scarce, attention abundant  Now  Attention scarce, resources abundant Competition for attention

Programs and research 10 Long tail information providers Impact? Systemwide efficiences Aggregation of supply Unified discovery Low transaction costs Aggregation of demand

Programs and research 11 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

Programs and research 12 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

Programs and research 13 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?

Programs and research 14 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.

Programs and research 15 The network rewrites the library: discovery and disclosure

Programs and research 16 Chris Beckett

Programs and research 17 Discovery: focus on catalog with some related …  Local Discovery Environments  Shared Discovery Environments  Syndicated Discovery Environments  Leveraged Discovery Environments

Programs and research 18 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 …

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Programs and research 26 Some remarks  How does MARC data play with other data  Subjects, authors,..  Historic investment in structure?  Duplicate cost?  Relationship to Metasearch?

Programs and research 27 Shared discovery environment  Increase impact  Create gravitational pull  Aggregate demand and supply  Reduce costs

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Programs and research 30 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

Programs and research 31 Syndicated discovery experience  Syndicate data or service or links

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Programs and research 38 Syndicating services  RSS  Portlets  APIs, Protocol-based  Projects  Sakailibrary  … Not as rapid as one might expect?

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Programs and research 42 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

Programs and research 43  Service disclosure less common  APIs  Web services  Portlets  HTML fragments – ‘search boxes’  Toolbars  Widgets, extensions, …

Programs and research 44 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

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Programs and research 47 Click – look in OCLC Resolver Registry – pass through to the relevant library

Programs and research 48 Some remarks  Some of these are toy-like now, but indicate a direction  Increased capacity to ‘sense’ structure (microformats) will improve ability.

Programs and research 49 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)

Programs and research 50 And OCLC ….