Libraries in the age of Amazoogle: some issues and responses: the example of

OpenWorldCat

Lorcan DempseyJISC/CNI Conference, 8/9 June 2004

Scan chapter .. Social landscape

• The ‘Amazoogle’ effect

• Value • The fabric of collaboration

• Generations

‘The future is here. It's justnot evenly distributed yet’

William Gibson

Overview …

The Amazoogle effect

• Four perceived user attributes?– Comprehensive– Accessible– Immediate gratification– ‘Followability’ of data

‘The net generation doesn’t love a wall’Eric Childress

The Amazoogle effect

• Creating network application platforms

– Computational hubs in a loosely coupled world

– E-bay, Google, Amazon, Mapquest, …

“Search engine mindshare” John Regazzi

• Scientists:– Google– Yahoo– PubMed

• Librarians:– Science Direct– ISI Web of Science– MedLine

Source: John Regazzi, The Battle for Mindshare: A battle beyond access and retrieval http://www.nfais.org/publications/mc_lecture_2004.htm

“In a survey for this lecture, librarians and scientists were asked to name the top scientific and medical search resources that they use or are aware of.  The difference is startling.”

‘Burn the catalog’

“Electronic catalogs, wherever you go in the academic world, have become a horrible crazy-quilt assemblage of incompatible interfaces and vendor-constrained listings. Working through […] a relatively small collection, you still have to navigate at least five completely different interfaces for searching. Historical epochs of data collection and cataloguing lie indigestibly atop one another.” Tim Burke, Swarthmore

“I’m to the point where I think we’d be better off to just utterly erase our existing academic catalogs and forget about backwards-compatibility, lock all the vendors and librarians and scholars together in a room, and make them hammer out electronic research tools that are Amazon-plus, Amazon without the intent to sell books but with the intent of guiding users of all kinds to the books and articles and materials that they ought to find, a catalog that is a partner rather than an obstacle in the making and tracking of knowledge. ” Tim Burke, Swarthmore

Open WorldCat

• Facilitate the rendezvous of users and library services on the web

• Surface the library where the users are

Some examples

• Book vendors and bibliographies ABE Books ABAA Alibris HCBIB BookPage

• Search engines (pilot with 2M records exposed as web pages for harvesting)

Google Yahoo!

Click in presentation mode to go through toexamples

Click in presentation mode to go through toexamples

Try a search for:A history of caricature and grotesque in literature and art Try a search for:A history of caricature and grotesque in literature and art

Example 1: Non-IP-authenticated userExample 1: Non-IP-authenticated user

User enters ‘uk’

User selects

(Non-IP-authenticated)(Non-IP-authenticated)

Example 2: IP-authenticated userExample 2: IP-authenticated user

User enters ‘uk’

(IP-authenticated)(IP-authenticated)

If the user’s IP address is recognized and can be mapped to a FirstSearch account, we will show fulfillment links that are active for that account.

See next slide for openURL results

(Results from openURL resolver)(Results from openURL resolver)

See next slide for click results

(Results from clicking “UNIcat Web OPAC”)(Results from clicking “UNIcat Web OPAC”)

Open WorldCat Architecture

Aggregators

Schemas and Vocabularies

Profiles and Relationships

Content Owner

Portals

Metadata

Distribution, Search,

Display

Access

Google, Yahoo and Book Vendors Organization and Presentation

OCLC Organizes WorldCat content in model suitable for harvesting, anticipate unique aspects of various portals

OCLC Uses Host of Authentication and Authorization tools to progressively match content to rights

OCLC Developed Geo-locator services to matches users to extensive FirstSearch WorldCat institution and user profiles

WorldCat , Additional collections can be added to Worldcatlibraries domain

OCLC will use tools such as xISBN and FRBR models to organize WorldCat public views suitable for low precision access

8/14/03:Googlecontractsigned

9/19/03:Google given go-ahead to harvest records

10/22/03:Google harvests150,000 records

Dec.’03:Records begin toappear in Google;800 inbound-linkslogged (search-site-originating[SSO])

Jan.’04:32,000 inboundlinks logged(SSO)

Mar.’04:109,000 inboundlinks logged(SSO)

5/21/04:Yahoocontractsigned

5/28/04:Yahooharvestsrecords

May’04:725,000 inboundlinks logged(SSO)

6/6/04:Yahoocompletesindexing of2 million WCrecords

Google and Yahoo! timeline

Traffic

800 32,064 42,659 108,971315,988

725,545

2,452,521

0

500,000

1,000,000

1,500,000

2,000,000

2,500,000

Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun*

Search Engine History

*Full record displays. Projected for June.

Off Click Dispersion

17%

1%7%

4%0%

69%

2%Full Text

ILL Request Form

Library Information Page

Library's Map Page

netLibrary

OPAC Links

OpenURL Resolver

Mechanics

• Google. Crawls web pages.

• Yahoo. Pulls file in IDIF (Inktomi Data Interchange Format)

Next steps …

• Expose all of WorldCat– 54M ‘titles’– 1B ‘holdings’

• Expose other data– ‘hosted data’– ContentDM collections– Other harvested collections

• Enrich services available at rendezvous page

Attributes

• Leverage OCLC ‘platform’

• Uniquely well-placed to broker many (searchers) to many (libraries) relationship

• Focus on increasing value and visibility of member libraries.