1. 1 University of California California Digital Library Deploying Services, Not Libraries (or, Staying out of the middle of the road) DEFF Sept-2005 CPH

2. 2 “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” - Jim Hightower, 1997 We’ll come back to this. Highway medians

3. 3 Last Generation Systems Libraries have done an admirable job of automating legacy applications. OPACs are wonderful card catalogs. ILSs did not appreciably change workflow practices. For most users, libraries are primarily still places with books and comfortable chairs.

4. 4 Digital library silos Libraries have built exquisite online library silos for texts, images, audio. Content is highly manicured, finely tailored, elegantly curated, and often invisible to the user community. For many disciplines, web defines currency. Search engines define utility.

5. 5 Change happens Most of the new developments with traction in our domain are not really about libraries: Repositories for scholarly assets, delivering both content access and preservation. A wide range of publishing services, for journal articles (pre-/post-print) and monographs. Support for Learning Object repositories. Externals: Google Scholar, Scopus, CiteSeer.

6. 6 Interesting times Yet this is an incredibly exciting time. Scholarly work and communication are being transformed by new modes of practice. Users are seeking not just content discovery services but content re-use, and even a hand in content creation (rip-mix-burn).

7. 7 Participate in change! Libraries must engage and seek solutions with other change-resistant content intermediaries: –Print publishers, and the MPAA and RIAA. Understand and appreciate the work of faculty. Understand how students use information today. Conduct informed advocacy for what users want, not what anyone thinks they should want.

8. 8 On Our To-Do list Engage all institutional stakeholders in the worth of digital assets and services. Explode the roles of libraries within the enterprise, penetrating core business activities, both academic and administrative. Challenge and change traditional funding models. Find new ways to make library services available to the users -- “flattening” the library.

9. 9 The road to services Libraries cannot achieve these things without altering themselves radically. Must engage different allies to provide new solutions and pursue different research Participate actively in open-source communities. Deploy service-oriented architectures, not build more digital library content or application silos.

10. 10 Services Oriented Architecture SoA means: A set of self-contained, functional components (of higher level applications) encapsulated as services; Interaction between services through well- defined interfaces; Implementation details that are hidden behind the service interface.

11. 11 CDL’s Common Framework CDL is building and utilizing a SoA that we call the Common Framework. The CF: –Is a philosophy governing software development –… a conceptual design for CDL services –… a specific technical architecture –… a set of “on the wire” services –… a growing number of applications –… probably already out of date

12. 12 CF Philosophy Composite, modular, lightweight are good. Design and implement services quickly. Reduce the need for application specific kludges. Make replacement and enhancement easy. Encourage staff training and development. Quests for perfection are not permitted.

13. 13 CF Design Use an elemental services conceptualization –E.g.: “search” - “admin” - “harvest” Applications are independent of services. Design atomic services to enable the easy construction or rebuilding of applications. New application « reuse existing services (or minor mods)

14. 14 CF Technology Strategy Common development environment. Web services based (XML, XSLT, Java). Preserve generic design in specification. Cleanly separate API (interface) layer. Services are agnostic on the src/dest of interaction, either machine or human. Externalize data mods when possible.

15. 15 CF Progress CDL continuously defines and prioritizes services development for the CF. UC Digital Preservation Repository (DPR) is the first production CDL application using CF services (v1.0, July 2005). Reciprocal design/functional review with customers inits change requests, which are prioritized and scheduled for development. CF permits rapid development cycles.

16. 16 Not just back-end SoA enables new modes of user interaction. If sufficiently pervasive, it fundamentally alters the meaning of an application and the ways in which data can be retrieved, manipulated, edited, and re-inserted. An application is now the sum of functions (services) addressable through APIs. –DPR is APIs for ingest+admin+search+…

17. 17 Web 2.0 Web 2.0 is an extension of the SoA concept. Service provider data and systems are made selectively public via API definitions. AJAX presentation technologies take advantage of services APIs through parsimonious client- server communication. Mashups, or combinations of disparate services in a single interface, are increasingly elegant and fluid.

18. 18 Housing Maps

19. 19 Consequences Web 2.0 accentuates the value in data (content) and service provision, not in branding, which is often forgone. Users can gain access to service definitions and functions and use them in new ways. Innovation is driven - in part - by the technical user community - a Bazaar model. Increases stickiness for the SP - not a net loss.

20. 20 Expectations Newer-gen apps such as location services, photo sharing (Flickr), social bookmarking (del.icio.us), and community networks (LinkedIn, MySpace) have raised user expectations. Users expect to be part of the creative flow of content, not just discovers or consumers, using tagging, user controlled resource association, etc.. Huge ramifications for organizations like libraries, and search engines.

21. 21 Social bookmarking

22. 22 Flickr tags

23. 23 Web 2.0 Impact -Leveraging The Long Tail.The Long Tail -Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. -Self-Service and Participation. -Radical Decentralization. -Emergent Behavior. - Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog, Sept-2005

24. 24 Web 2.0 Meme Map Tim O’Reilly, Foo Camp, 2005 (Flickr)

25. 25 Lines of Business Open services suggest libraries might not need to be engaged in every line of business. Flickr is a nice product, and if its API was opened up more, it might make a great tool for faculty image collections. Rights, access, persistence are complicated: but there is something here to discuss.

26. 26 Collaboration essential As more DLs and external firms develop service platforms, it makes sense to utilize them whenever possible and appropriate. Same true for tools: CDL uses Lucene, has modified it to enhance its performance, and returned the results to the Apache Group. OCLC WorldCat may be the best union catalog available, with increasing links to services (OpenURL linking, FRBR, etc).

27. 27 A community library “As we move forward, libraries will increasingly have to source shared processes and infrastructure through common platforms - the opportunity costs of not so doing are too high given the range of issues they face.” - Lorcan Dempsey, Sept-2005

28. 28 A Future of Interactions Imagine new types of content services: –collaborating communities easily maintaining shared and secure lists of scholarly resources –applications and tools (e.g., MIT’s Project Simile) which permit the wholesale linking of disparate content sources into the container or presentation layer of one’s choice –supporting the redefinition of both publishing and the products of creative work.

29. 29 The New Library Let’s imagine a new collection of digitized monographs: the Alliance Library. Let’s assume it has content from multiple sources (academic libraries, gov’t printing offices, and important NGOs). Maybe some of the content is under tighter access (rights) restrictions than the rest, for varying reasons.

30. 30 Alliance Library Features could include: –multiple sites for access and preservation –automatic replication of content across sites –different branding options per site –granulated access rights via Shibboleth –published APIs to enable mash-ups, e.g., tagging of book bibliographies and links to other services such as OCLC’s WorldCat.

31. 31 Easy to personalize Amazon-like PZN would be straightforward for users willing to trade minimal privacy via additional, persistent attribute release. Other users also looked at, Your recently viewed list, user reviews, and topical user- maintained lists open to tagging: these all pose great value-adds for even (gasp!) an academic digital library.

32. 32 Next Gen Bib Services Mellon-funded project at the CDL - 1.Assess feasibility of using a Lucene XML-based indexing and discovery system. 2.Assess feasibility and test methods for ordering result sets based on relevance. 3.Assess feasibility and test methods for incorporating recommending and pzn strategies. 4.Assess feasibility and test methods for offering auto-correction. 5.Explore the feasibility of supporting alternative UI strategies.

33. 33 Recommendations The Making of the English Working Class - E.P. Thompson, 1963

34. 34 What’s the goal? The goal is to deploy a range of services that encourage others to build applications which manipulate content, permitting users to work with the content and services in the manner of their choosing. Services can be built internally or integrated from external SPs.

35. 35 In other words SoA is about putting down the paving, the yellow median stripe, and the shoulders for a fast road. It’s about letting folks drive it without steering for them. Basically, drivers need minimal guidelines: stay on the road, don’t go in the wrong direction. By providing simple and excellent infrastructure, you don’t have to design the next generation car - the users will do it for you. You just need to get out of the way.

36. 36 Rip, Mix, Burn "Apple, of course, wants to sell computers. Yet its ad touches an ideal that runs very deep in our history. For the technology that they (and of course others) sell could enable this generation to do with our culture what generations have done from the very beginning of human society: to take what is our culture; to "rip" it - meaning to copy it; to "mix" it - meaning to reform it however the user wants; and finally, and most important, "burn" it - to publish it in a way that others can see and hear. Digital technology could enable an extraordinary range of ordinary people to become part of a creative process."  Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas

37. 37 Thank you for listening