Digital Library
Executive Briefing
17 April 2008
The Digital Futures
Forum: Delivering
web-scale library
systems
John MacColl
European Director,
OCLC Programs & Research
The web-scale world
Turmoil and chaos
RLG Programs’ analysis
• Large-scale information hubs (not libraries)
• Hidden resources needing network exposure
• Information consumer behaviour is changing
• Operating environments are changing
• A consensus is emerging
• But there are barriers to progress …
Within a few years …
• Comprehensive research collecting will soon be done by very few
institutions
• Many more will concentrate on promoting their special and unique
collections
• Museums and archives will seek to make their materials comprehensively
available on the web
• Redundant physical collections will be managed in a centralised way
• Non-local physical materials will be acquired as digital surrogates
• Collecting foci will shift and gain emphasis
• There will be major reorganisations of staffing effort and changes in
expertise requirements
Landscape upheaval
• Agile, rich, new players
• Library budget pressure
• Service fragmentation
• Redundant effort
• Shallow client connections
Urgency
• The last 2-3 years have seen significant changes in the environment
(OCLC Perceptions Report)
• Respondents use search engines to begin an information search (84
percent). One percent begin an information search on a libraryWeb site.
(Part 1.2)
• Search engines are rated higher than librarians. (Part 2.6)
• Respondents do not trust purchased information more than free
information. The verbatim comments suggest a high expectation of free
information. (Part 3.4)
• Library users like to self-serve. Most respondents do not seek assistance
when using library resources. (Part 2.4)
• Huge impact on expectations – including those of researchers
• How do we move closer to an ideal system-wide organisation?
Current context
• Network-level aggregation of supply
and demand
• Newly conditioned expectations
affect patterns of learning, research,
information production and
consumption
• Personal collections and data
production
• Social media and social networking
Revenues of key players
25
23.4
Microsoft
Google
20
Elsevier
15
All journal
publishers
£bn
SCONUL libraries
10
7.5
UK Science
Budget
5.3
5
Funding Councils
(Research)
3.4
1.5
0.5
1.7
0
Source: Michael Jubb, RIN. Conference on Sustaining the Digital Library,
Edinburgh, September 2007
David and Goliath?
• Profits: Microsoft ~£7bn, Google ~£1.8bn
• Microsoft expenditure on R&D is equal to the UK
Science Budget (£3.4bn); Google’s is ~£1bn
• UK national and university libraries’ total expenditure is
less than half Google’s R&D spend
• Even in the US and Canada, the total spend of the
relatively well-endowed ARL libraries amounts only to
£1.8bn
• “So an obvious point to make here is that, in a context
where commercial companies are clearly already
players in the business of developing, providing, and
sustaining digital content, it would be foolish to cut
ourselves off from the resources that they have
available to invest”
Source: Michael Jubb, RIN. Conference on Sustaining the
Digital Library, Edinburgh, September 2007
‘Discovery happens elsewhere’
alexa.com traffic ranking
1
2
4
7
9
38
(Typical UK research
university library
~20,000)
How we are responding
Trends and imperatives
Insertion into the flow
The changing LMS
• The Integated Networked Library System
• Deconstructing the LMS …
• … the network-level OPAC (WorldCat Local)
• Network-level ERM (reducing redundancy)
• OSS LMSs: Koha; Evergreen
• Software as a Service
• Divesting institutional hardware and software (the ‘utility
model’)
The collective collection
• Industrial-scale digitisation (move away from boutique)
• Harmonised digitisation
• Digitisation on-demand (user pays?)
• Industrial-scale digitisation of special collections and archives
(‘Get over it’)
• Shared print storage (who has the last copy?)
• Community solutions to preservation: CLOCKSS; Portico
Collections freed from buildings
• LAM convergence
• Collection revelation
(metadata, then
interoperability, then fulltext)
• Greene-Meissner imperative
Awake in a web world
• Library services rethought for the web
architecture
• Resources (URIs) not repositories
• ‘Usage Factor’ becomes the new ‘Impact
Factor’
• The ‘reader’ is an ‘e-shopper’
• Employing the ‘hive mind’; users as
contributors and fact-checkers
• Universal Loss of Control?
‘Feels free’
• Copyright disappears
• Licensed payment - journals and
textbooks
• Funder-paid Open Access
• More sophisticated barriers to
unlicensed usage
The changing economics of academic
libraries?
Curation/Preservation
Locally-curated
digital content
Move into research flows
Consolidate low-use print
Pool licensing purchase
power
The Research Outputs Management
Environment
• The third-party-published journal article will lose its
authoritative place in the research outputs environment
• Change drivers: Open Access; research assessment;
academy-produced metrics; data publication
• Control moving back to the Academy
• Research funder pays: SCOAP3
• Baseline price set by libraries, not publishers?
Possibilities with web-scale library data
Possibilities with web-scale library data
Web-scale library data and ‘players’
The cooperative imperative
• WorldCat represented cooperation
in cataloguing
• Just the beginning?
• We need to continue to leverage
the investment in new and
imaginative ways
Thank You!
Questions?
(Images courtesy of www.galleriaborghese.it)