InfoTech

Innovation Symposium: The Future Is Mobile

Video chat, video voice mail, and real-time media sharing are destined for contextually aware smartphones, the device of choice for the next generation. But are libraries ready? To help libraries reach mobile users and keep track of mobile innovation, LJ and OCLC cosponsored "The Future Is Mobile," a May 20 online symposium (bit.ly/bgwyLY).

Three keynote speakers from the business world offered a perspective from outside of libraries, including occasional surprise at library world features like strict data policies, and fielded questions from a "bullpen panel" of librarians and vendor representatives.

OCLC VP of innovation Mike Teets told the audience of some 1200 librarians that mobile services are not just fun to have but rather "critical to the long-term existence of libraries and librarianship." The demographics are clear: library-oriented sites and services, like WorldCat.org, LibraryThing, the Library of Congress, and OpenLibrary.org, are used most heavily by those 55 and older.

The mobile demographic, however, skews heavily toward those 18-54. "That's exactly the group our catalogs are not connecting with," Teets said.

4G, and speedy services

Lindsay Notwell of Verizon Wireless described the service landscape library patrons will likely come to expect from a next-generation, or 4G, cellular network. (Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile have chosen LTE for their 4G infrastructure, while Sprint Nextel has chosen WIMAX, a competing standard.)

Essentially, 4G technology will boost the speed available to mobile users and reduce bottlenecks like latency, or the lag-time, in sending data packets to and from servers. This opens the door to video chat, video voice mail, real-time media sharing, and mobile gaming.

When questioned by the bullpen, Notwell was coy about the possibility of the iPhone on Verizon ("Apple has its plans, we have our plans," he said), but he was more forthcoming on possibilities for libraries ("Let's face it; the world is going mobile, and your patrons are going mobile"). Libraries must be there, he said, or they will lose relevance. For upcoming generations, Notwell said, "[the mobile device] is their computer."

Converging access

We're headed toward a paradigm shift, said consultant Sarah Allen of Blazing Cloud, thanks to ubiquitous access to powerful computing applications and vast stores of data. Contextually aware phones will change how people interact with technology and information, Allen predicted, and the convenience that awareness affords will spur adoption. As phones are integrated more and more into daily tasks, "annotated reality" will become an increasingly important intermediary between real-world places and objects and the discoverable metadata linked to them.

Allen suggested that librarians could carve out an important niche if they're able "to bridge [the] gap between the fuzzy, human search for wisdom and this vast array of static information."

She suggested patrons might be able to access the library as a kind of hub for sifting through information on a variety of topics as identified by a contextually aware smartphone.

And what will get mobile devices to become an access point for libraries? Allen responded, "All it will take is one great app."

"The Internet of Things"

Delving deeper into the notion of inter-connectedness, IBM's Jack Mason told the audience that a vast array "of everyday products, objects, and devices will be" talking to one another in the very near future. This Outernet, or "the Internet of Things," stands to propel the already exponential change further in terms of users' interactions with a data-enabled world.

Mason surmised that machine intelligence will soon surpass the capabilities of individual humans. "That doesn't mean that the Borg are going to take over," he noted, but human inter-action will be profoundly affected, relying more and more on information systems to handle routine encounters. Going forward, maybe the future role for libraries is "to become the comfort zone for people to understand and deal with a world that's going to change so much," he concluded.


Will Blio & Copia Platforms Come to Libraries?

Reps from the new ebook platforms Copia and Blio joined two librarians—New York Public Library deputy director of collections and circulating operations Christopher Platt (pictured, top) and Toronto Public Library collection development manager Susan Caron (bottom)—on an LJ Day of Dialog panel May 25 prior to the opening of this year's BookExpo America.

Before they got to the big and un-resolved question—Can these new platforms, not yet in libraries, bring large amounts of new e-content—Copia VP Sol Rosenberg and Baker & Taylor's George Coe (president, library & education division) and Michael Bills (director, sales and digital products) described how the platforms offer enhanced ebooks, opportunities for annotation, and device agnosticism. Caron suggested that the currently popular digital book vendors OverDrive and NetLibrary lack depth in content.

However, in what would become a theme, Coe and Rosenberg responded by saying it's tough to convince some publishers that e-content in libraries is not a threat. Prompted by Platt, Rosenberg discussed Copia's interest in making discoverability via a library as good as the consumer experience. Coe explained Blio's plans for ILS integration, which would allow patrons to buy and "rent" books from the same site, a branded extension of a catalog. Blio software is free for consumers to download. Caron asked, "Will libraries pay fees akin to OverDrive's annual hosting and site construction fees?" Bills said Blio aims to keep costs low rather than build a new platform for each library. Again, noting the need to consider publishers' revenue streams, Bills said, 'everyone is willing to experiment.' [For more on Day of Dialog, see p. 16.]—Anna Katterjohn

OCLC Record Policy Set To Take Effect August 1

After more than a year and a half of proposals, withdrawals, and revisions, OCLC's final updated policy governing the usage of WorldCat records is set to go "live" on August 1.

The document, an update to the current "Guidelines for Use and Transfer of OCLC Derived Records" (from 1987), is written in the form of an agreement on "Rights and Responsibilities" governing both OCLC Cooperative members and the steward organization itself.

This commitment-driven approach is a departure from OCLC's previous attempts, criticized for being opaque and for featuring legalistic language.

The version recently approved by the OCLC Board of Trustees largely resembles the version submitted for draft review in April (see InfoTech, LJ 5/15/10, p. 18). A comparison of the changes made is available on the Record Use Policy site.

Many of the alterations amount to tweaks of phrasing. For example, one section heading previously titled "Addressing Inappropriate Use of WorldCat Data by Members" now reads "Addressing Disputed Use of WorldCat Data by Members." Another involves the change from a section titled "WorldCat's Viability and Value" to "WorldCat's Value and Sustainability."

As far as published criticisms are concerned, OCLC's efforts to engage the community seem to have proven effective. The past versions of the guidelines prompted an outpouring of blog posts and analyses, but only a handful followed the revision issued for comment in April.

NYPL Joins HathiTrust, as Repository Brands

New York Public Library (NYPL) is the latest research institution—and the first public library—to join the ranks of the HathiTrust repository, a 27-institution effort to preserve and make accessible digital texts. The library will add some 300,000 scans of public domain works, or material to which NYPL owns the rights. As with most of the content that comprises the HathiTrust's core, the NYPL digital scans are the product of the library's partnership with Google Book Search.

The HathiTrust meanwhile has taken steps to brand materials to indicate the institutions from which they came. Efforts include watermarks on every page identifying both the digitizing agent and the source library, as well as the branding of the page-turner application with the HathiTrust name.

Europeana Paper Suggests Linked Data Solutions

The collaborative digital library project Europeana refocuses energies in its first white paper, "Knowledge = Information in Context." The paper proposes linked data, and a semantic search engine, to make it easier to find a wide range of digital objects, from art to television programs.

Europeana's digital collections, writes the paper's author, Stefan Gradmann, should be more than a portal to monolithic silos of digital information. Instead, the institutions that contribute to Europeana have great potential to cultivate an expression of knowledge with new web applications and more intelligently linked resources.

While Google Book Search continues to amass a digital library of unprecedented magnitude, the fledgling Europeana aims to reach 15 million items by 2015. It has seven million so far and hopes to achieve ten million items this year. These include born-digital resources as well as digital surrogates of paintings, photos, maps, books, manuscripts, cylinders, tapes, newsreels, and television broadcasts.

Gradmann, a specialist in web-based knowledge representation, intends to implement semantic web technologies via the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI ORE) model. Ideally, semantic metadata linkages would intuit that a user searching for "Paris" might also be interested in "the Louvre" or the mythical figure of "Paris" and will automatically extrapolate suggestions and display them as thumbnail images.—Michael Greenlee