Indeed, one of Elsevier’s prototypes seems more fitting for high school or undergrad classroom discussions, especially if they were to take into account Lagendijk’s points about context.

Credit: RT @atmire: RT @jimtill: #OpenAccess Elsevier going the wrong way: http://bit.ly/D16Am

At MPOW we’re hoping to migrate the library’s static HTML web site to the Drupal CMS. We’ve been using Drupal successfully for a year and a half for an offsite affiliate project and for a SEPA grant-funded project.  We have access to develop the current site using .NET when we want, but we don’t have the resources to do any significant development. Lack of PHP (and MySQL) support on campus is the only thing that has kept us from making the jump to Drupal.  While we have an ample ‘Nix VPS to host it on, I’m concerned that we don’t have the resources to maintain and update Apache or the PHP and MySQL frameworks.

Our current Drupal projects are hosted on inexpensive shared hosting which has been mostly sufficient for what we need including shell access, SVN, CVS, and Apache .htaccess capability. I don’t have to worry about updates to Apache, PHP, MySQL, or the OS.  If we were to host the library’s web site offsite as well, I’d want the best of both worlds: reliable support, a managed environment, dedicated RAM and processor cycles, but also full access to Apache’s httpd.conf.  Pair Networks is attractive for all these reasons. Also, our current host doesn’t support Java/Tomcat/Jetty which means we’d still have to host Solr separately on campus and manage access to it from other applications. Tomcat or Jetty support on the same host would be nice, but it’s not a deal-breaker.

Why do we want to migrate to Drupal? For many of the same reasons hundreds of other libraries and thousands of organizations do:

• a huge, and growing, user community,
• an overwhelming number of user-contributed themes and modules that extend Drupal’s core functionality,
• Drupal’s flexibility for modeling and displaying content,
• Drupal’s taxonomy and tagging support.

But these are all means to the end. In the end, we want our web site to deliver information well and make it easy for people to find what they want or learn how to get what they want.  David Lee King, Topeka’s Digital Branch Manager, recently offered 10 reminders that we strongly identify with.

Based on our experience with Drupal so far and conversations we’ve been having for a long time, here are some things we want to do.

• Make it easier and more enjoyable for our staff to post or update content to the web site.
• Improve how we provide news about library resources and services. Patrons can subscribe by email or RSS to various “channels”, e.g. type of content, subject, author.
• Advertise “featured” content and give our “marquee” an extreme makeover that showcases what’s happening.
• Create subject guides and more audience-oriented channels of content without unnecessarily duplicating content. Example, “you’re into pathology? Here are the best available resources for you. Oh, and here’s what’s new in PubMed and here’s a librarian to contact. In the hospital? Sure. Here’s the set of online clinical resources, image collections, and what we have on the shelves.”
• Integrate metadata from Voyager, the institutional repository (DSpace), and Serials Solutions using the Extensible Catalog Drupal toolkit to create a better discovery layer across all our resources, i.e. open up the silos.… And to put it into context with the rest of our content.
• Integrate content from other sites.
• Manage FAQ’s.
• Improve library instruction, i.e. “where-to-find, how-to-use”, without duplicating content.
• Encourage conversation and feedback by giving patrons the ability to comment on the web site or in whatever social network(s) rule the day.
• Distribute content between multiple “affiliated” sites, between the Library web site and project/partner sites.
• Support mobile devices.

We’re confident we can accomplish them with Drupal (and yes, Solr) in a relatively short amount of time.

This edition of E2 almost makes me wish we’d moved to Portland 10 years ago when we were considering it.  What’s most inspiring is that the city commissioners, mayor, and other spearheaders interviewed don’t just talk about emissions and traffic, but about reviving the city while also drawing boundaries to preserve farmland and forests.

I get the same stir of inspiration from Tom and Christine Sine.

Is any of this possible in our midwestern sprawl-addicted stateline-divided city?

Having been a frequent reader of Deepak Singh’s business|bytes|genes|molecules blog over the last year, I was interested to see him hired by Amazon as business development manager of Amazon Web Services.  On December 04, 2008, Deepak posted to the AWS blog the announcement of Public Data Sets on AWS.  PDS on AWS is a data sharing experiment that takes advantage of Amazon’s in-the-cloud storage and computing services.

Just two weeks after Deepak’s post, Clint Boulton at eWeek confirmed that Google had axed its own Research Datasets project along with other projects of questionable value to Google’s bottom line.  While sharing data across the web, publicly or not, will surely become more common among researchers, milking copious amounts of ad revenue from that sharing is less likely.

The storage and computation of large datasets appears to be more in line with the AWS business model and perhaps Amazon has the lead on scalable architecture to support cloud computing.   Even if large numbers of researchers and research projects store and crunch their data on the web, that in itself won’t score big in the social web scene.  Programmers, analysts, and machines are more likely to be interfacing directly with the data than are the research investigators themselves.

It’s yet to be seen what Microsoft’s strategy for data storage might be in the recently released Azure platform, but they obviously have eyes on the educational and research markets.  Products like live@edu and SharePoint are increasing Microsoft’s reach into the academic computing world.

The Microsoft Research group quietly released a beta version it’s own repository software, running on .NET and SQL Server of course, but this isn’t just a reformulation of Dspace using Microsoft ingredients:

“The platform focuses on the management of research assets-such as people, papers, lectures, workflows, data, and tags-as well as the semantic relationships between them.”

Sounds like they’re paying attention.  And they’re beginning to appeal in ecumenical fashion to the larger research community by offering things like OfficeSWORD and taking part in discussions about open research repositories.

What is most interesting from the perspectives of the library and the university’s research office is how these services will redefine our notion of the “institutional repository”.  On one hand, many IT services such as web hosting and email have been commoditized to the point that institutions, especially smaller publicly-funded campuses, are unable to resist the cost savings and agility that come from hosted services like live@edu.  Why not commit fully to the .NET architecture and have your institutional repository software and data hosted on Azure as well?

On the other hand, why not take advantage of AWS’ flexibility and scalability for storing data or running our repository application?

Regardless of the platform(s) we choose, our notion of “institutional repository” is going to be stretched as we want to aggregate data and services from multiple platforms.  How will our Dspace service reflect our data stored in AWS?  The building blocks are already in place to support more complex relationships between our repositories, services, and data.  The time has finally come to put them to work.

…the popular search engines perform full text searches of unstructured text but enterprise content is much more structured than content in the Internet at large, it often contains fielded data in databases, and it is often hierarchically organized. Federated search vendors that want to sell into the enterprise need to consider this important difference.

True. However, Google isn’t new to enterprise search and they’re quick to point out that the algorithms they use for web content aren’t the same as for the GSA. Nevertheless, I am curious to know if it’s Google or MuseGlobal doing the relevancy math.

Sol also makes an interesting prediction about the impact the product will have on the market:

For better or worse, I think this offering will get many potential customers to view federated search as a commodity. Thus, it will force the high-end federated search vendors to work even harder than they do now to differentiate themselves from their low-end competitors. I can see it now: prospective customers will start using Google as a reference for product comparisons and will expect vendors to provide cheap and simple solutions.

My information, including an article at Information Today, says the AAC will run, in most cases, at least $50,000 plus over two years. That’s in addition to the cost of the Google appliance. I’m not sure which competitors or price tags Sol considers low-end in the federated search space. I wouldn’t consider this low-end. In my experience, such a price point might actually hit a sweet spot where only a couple of vendors exist now, especially for organizations that have already invested in Google search.

Recently, a Medlib-er asked for examples of how medical librarians were using Microsoft Sharepoint. The majority of respondants said they had created sites or pages for their library in Sharepoint, duplicating the usual stuff found on library web sites: ILL forms, links to the public catalog, and other sites – essentially reconstructing the library’s public web site in the Intranet, or even just linking to it.

I don’t mean to disparage the efforts of my cohort. Hospital and corporate librarians tend to be lone rangers with little time, resources, and permission to push the envelope. At least they did something. I’m convinced, though, that we can do better than that.

At the academic medical campus where I work, we’ve had a (non-Sharepoint) staff and student portal for some time. The library has worked closely with developers to incorporate some library services into the portal. From my brief experience, though, University staff only pay attention to the portal every two weeks when it’s time to print their timesheets. Students visit maybe a little more frequently to check their campus accounts. Ultimately, though, there’s no reason for anyone to visit the portal in order to get work done.

Sharepoint, as collaboration space, I hope will be different. My goal is to insert library services into the flow of work and study. Not in a “hey, look at us” or “eat your spinach” kind of way, but invisibly and naturally. I’ve spent a little time envisioning how we might accomplish that. I hope to spend a lot more time over the next year.
Here are my early thoughts:
Identify the stages and flow of research, work, and study on campus that might take place in Sharepoint.
Find areas where there’s been an observable, neglected need and suggest how the library might help, eg. metadata, text analysis, categorization, training.
Build small, modular web parts, connectors, and widgets that faculty, staff, and students can include in their own spaces.
Don’t make people come to the Library’s Sharepoint site to do something.
Don’t waste time recreating the Library’s web site in Sharepoint.
Don’t just link to the web site.
Share openly.
I got some serendipitous affirmation and inspiration today while following up on a medical student’s request. Upon entering med school, our medical students receive digital versions of recommended textbooks. This student wanted to know, reasonably enough, if there was an add-on for incorporating Stedman’s Medical Dictionary (which he already owned in digital copy) into Microsoft Word or, even better, OneNote – a popular tablet pc notetaking application among our students [1].

While searching for available options, I ran across a presentation by Carl Nolan, head of the medical research services project involving Microsoft and NHS.  Here’s an excerpt from an article by Microsoft:

Microsoft has invested £40 million in the Common User Interface programme – a series of projects to help the NHS get the most out of its IT investment. One of these projects has been looking for ways to build medical research services into the software that NHS staff already use every day.

These are exactly the kinds of services I would like to see us implement at KUMC. I hope they’re sharing.

Note: What I ultimately found was that for $100 you can buy the Stedman’s Medical Spellchecker which adds a custom dictionary to MS Office apps. But that’s only spellchecking. What if I want to look up the definition of a new term? Ideally, I’d want the spellchecking dictionary feature wrapped into a single service-package with the full dictionary available in the Research Services Task Pane. Instead, both Microsoft and LWW make seem to make that impossible.

The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education….

The core of the report describes six areas of emerging technology that will impact higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years. To identify these areas, the project draws on an ongoing conversation among knowledgeable persons in the fields of business, industry, and education; on published resources, current research and practice; and on the expertise of the NMC and ELI communities….

Learn more about the Horizon Project and contribute to future editions at http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Main_Page.  NMC is a community of hundreds of leading universities, colleges, museums, and research centers exploring the use of media and emerging technologies in higher education.

I first learned about WPopac at Corey’s IUG Presentation, “Designing An OPAC for Web 2.0“. As a satisfied new user of WordPress, I was already convinced that somehow it might be a great tool for the library. I certainly wasn’t the first to wonder how and Corey’s work wrapped some flesh around it.

You can experience WPopac at Plymouth State, Corey’s place, and there are more implementations to come.

Who needs WebOPAC software for our catalogs as long as we have access to our data and open source apps like WordPress or Joomla!? The answer, of course, is those of us who are locked into turnkey systems that build walls around our data and then force us to pay for still more software in order to stick some doors into the walls. Change is in the air though, especially as librarians increasingly take to the Web 2.0 meme and begin to expect more from their systems.

1. Ideas come from everywhere
2. Share everything you can
3. You’re brilliant, we’re hiring
4. A license to pursue dreams
5. Innovation, not instant perfection