Libraries in the age of Amazoogle: some issues and responses: the example of
OpenWorldCat
Lorcan DempseyJISC/CNI Conference, 8/9 July 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.