Last year I blogged about this, and it’s nice to note that 62 libraries have taken up this free service from Ex Libris.

MetaLib v4 is due out later this year, so some highlights here…

Accessibility

This has long been a bone of contention with MetaLib (and other Ex Libris products), and finally we are seeing the fruits of long conversations with Ex Libris about this. With ML 4 we have coming:
Section 508 Compliance
JAWS, Dragon and wide range of browsers tested
Use of HTML, CSS Validity (HTMS 4.01 Transitional, CSS 2.0)
Simplicity – ‘lighten’ HTML (reduced source code by 60-70%!), and reduce use of JS
Ease of Customisation – to reduce TCO

At the same time Ex Libris have endeavoured to keep the user interface exactly the same as it is in v3.x. There are some slight changes, but these are mainly in the areas of new options (e.g. non-js version). Some changes that may be noticed by the end user are that the pop-ups are now different, and can be resized, moved etc. (unlike currently), also when you leave MetaLib, then a message informs them that this is happening with a customisable message.

Enhanced Search results

This is a major change in v4. There will be the ability to cluster and ‘facet’ search results. This should enable users to analyze results at a glance, and to expose new or related topics to the user – to enable navigation and further refining of results.

‘Clusters’ are derived from text mining of a user’s search results records. Ex Libris are using licensed clustering technology from Vivissimo. Note that Clusters are not taken from a taxonomy, and are built ‘on the fly’. The clusters are presented as an expandable/collapsible hierarchy.

Facets on the otherhand are ‘pre-selected’ (by Ex Libris), and are built on structured fields from the retrieved records – for v4, Ex L are providing Author, Publication date and Journal title facets.

From the users point of view, ‘clusters’ and ‘facets’ are presented in the same way, so they aren’t aware of any difference and don’t have to worry about the semantic differentiation above! The user just sees the option to view records by topic, date, author or journal title.

KnowledgeBase Enhancements

Over the last year between 250 and 300 have been added to the central KB over the last year – with around a third of these coming from user driven requests.

Ex Libris prefer to work with resources that support z39.50 or XML standard gateways – as this helps maintain a low TCO.

Rollout of ML4

Quite a lot of enhancement originally intended for ML4 have actually been released in service packs to v3.13. This includes:

X-Server enhancements (sign up for some details of user implementations in the ‘Innovative Users of Metalib’ Webinar on the 18th October).
Statistics and Reports (I haven’t noticed any improvements here – perhaps we need to look at these again?)
MetaIndex (which in our case, we have not got)

ML4 will start by release to Ex Libris offices and distributors in December 2006, and will start to be available to ‘early adopters’ in early 2007. There will be an ‘upgrade express’ kit, which will allow customer’s to apply the upgrade without impacting on the ‘live’ version (given enough disk space presumably).

The future

Even with the upcoming developments with Primo, MetaLib is stil a key component in Ex Libris’ overall strategy. The areas of focus for development are:

MetaLib at ‘point of need’ – user focused and integrated into other environments such as VLEs, Portals and of course Primo
Lowering TCO for MetaLib

Oren Beit-Arie is the Chief Strategy Officer at Ex Libris, and is going to talk about the company’s vision and strategy, and also will talk briefly about a new product – Primo.

Originally a ‘Library’ was a place. Library management was about managing the physical space, and the physical stock – providing access to the physical collection was the challenge.

Ex Libris started in 1980 with the Aleph library system, which was focussed on the challenges of managing physical collections.

However, in recent years, there has been an exponential growth of electronic resources, and now libraries are managing both a physical collection, and electronic resources. Associated with this is a shift from owning to licensing resources for libraries.

Comparing ARL stats of total materials expenditure, and e-resources expenditure, the 11 year compound annual growth rate up to 2004 has been 6.3% for overall expenditure and 30.2% for e-resources. In 2004 e-resources expenditure represted over 30% of total expenditure.

So – this has led to some new challenges/needs:

Linking between web of resources (the appropriate copy problem)
Simultaneous search across disparate collections and systems
Management – new models of acquisition and licensing

And of course (this being a supplier presentation!) Ex Libris had developed systems to help with these problems – SFX, MetaLib and Verde respectively – which have been introduced from 2000 onwards.

Cynicism aside, SFX certainly led the way in terms of OpenURL resolvers. It is also worth noting that all three products are the result of close collaboration with the Ex Libris user community – a strong recommendation for both the company, and the work of the user groups and user community.

There is also an increase in digital assets being created – perhaps this applies especially to the University market, where digitisation of readings, exam papers, pre- and post-prints, archives, and increasingly ‘born digital’ material – all of the above, and learning objects, web pages etc. etc.

Oren proposes that the ‘big picture’ can be split into things ‘under library control’ (probably, but not necessarily, ‘local’), and those ‘not under library control’ – e.g. e-books, e-journals, databases – often licensed resources. Oren also notes that this isn’t really the big picture – this is the ‘library’ picture – if we look at the user, they will be drawing a huge range of information sources and services.

Also, we are now in an environment where many users are also creators (although recent figures indicate that this isn’t a huge percentage)

All this leads Ex Libris to the following strategy:

1 – the end-user: provide a system and services that will enable libraries to expose content and services to users where and when they need it and in the way they expect it

Library content and services should be offered to users in context – so promote interoperability, open interfaces.

I’m really hoping that we are in the market for a Digital Object Repository in the next 12-18 months. We are currently implementing Moodle, and I’m keen to see this underpinned by a good repository. Of course, being an Ex Libris customer, DigiTool is one possibility on my mind.

In this session, it is interesting to see some uses of DigiTool in the real world (links should go to the DigiTool instance where possible):

E-Theses, E-Prints (Liverpool John Moores) – this includes what looks like a nice work flow and user interface for E-prints
Online exam papers (University of Melbourne)
Online photos (Coldharbour)
Cultural Heritage collections (quite a lot of places – Spertus College, Boston College, Boston Public Library, AIATSIS, BVB)

The Cultural Herigate collections have a huge amount of variety – books (METS), pictures (tiff, jpeg), audio and video

EAD – not to manage the archive, but to store and present the information from the archive.

Catalog enrichment (HBZ) – they are using it to scan and store the Tables of Contents for more than 300,000 books and then use these to enrich the metadata available via the catalogue. (looks like this is in test at the moment – http://193.30.112.126:8881)

Preservation (HBZ again) – using it to store web pages in an archive (also looks like it is in test – http://193.30.112.125:8881 – search for “loreley”)

Overall this has been a good overview of real life uses of DigiTool – it’s good to see a real body of use developing. I have a particular interest in how DigiTool might integrate with VLEs or Course Management systems – for example, to work as a repository for SCORM or IMS CP objects.

In terms of future developments, Ex Libris are currently working on an improved OAI interface, synchronisation between Aleph and DigiTool, Versioning, improved METS viewer, URN and persistent identifiers, additional metadata support – e.g. VRA and MODS.

Coming out of a discussion over coffee, a question – are the search functions within VLEs good enough? My recent experience with Moodle is that as soon as you have any substantial amount of content, the search isn’t good enough (try searching at http://moodle.org)

So – if we were going to index parts of our VLE, where should we start? Discussions, content…?

Essentially the message here is that in v19, the functionality that is currently split across a web ILL interface (for ISO ILL), and a GUI client interface (for non-ISO ILL) is being brought together into a single GUI client interface (GUI ILL2). This single GUI will be available in v18, but v19 will only have this single GUI, with the old GUI and Web interfaces being deprecated.

This will bring the ILL GUI in line with the other GUI interfaces in Aleph.

I’m looking forward to having the new ILL GUI, but to be honest our ILL dept works fine at the moment, and we probably don’t have enough traffic to gain much from the ISO ILL functionality.

I almost decided to go to the MetaLib/SFX session instead of this, as our Aleph installation is now pretty mature, and I’m having difficulty getting excited by small increments in Aleph functionality.

However, in his opening talk Matti mentioned a couple of things that would be covered to whet my appetite, so while Damyanti is hearing about MetaLib and SFX, I’m in the Aleph session, hoping that it keeps my interest…

Perhaps the most interesting development for us are:

Staff permissions

The first phase of enhancing staff permissions in in v18, this includes extra information about library staff – e.g. expiry dates. This should make the management of staff accounts earlier.

There are further development to come in v19 which look at workflows and processes to grant permissions, rather than very detailed individual bits of functionality.

Staff Interface for Aleph Configuration

This is starting in v18, and continuing in v19. Ex Libris are trying to integrate configuration within the Aleph GUI. This is not just to have the config tables edited via the GUI (which can already be done), but to simplify the process of configuration, with Function/Task oriented workflows, and a more intuitive and graphic UI. All this, of course, appropriately permissioned.

This latter development is something that was tried a few years ago, but didn’t really succeed, as they focussed on just giving a GUI to the text based tables – which didn’t really simplify anything.

In this case they are committed to actually using the interface to help the system administratror – ensuring that information in one table is cross checked with any dependent tables, and that any codes are ‘decoded’ in the GUI (so use descriptions rather than numbers in the the GUI)

As a demonstration of what they are going to do, they have done this for ‘Opening Hours’ (tab17 I think?) in v18. This allows non-systems staff to edit the opening hours.

In v19, they are starting with this new configuration GUI in the Circulation module – it is probably the most complex configuration.

In v19 they are also focussing on the ‘Task Manager’ – to make it easier to use, and view outcomes from the Batch logs. They want to improve the scheduler (job_list) to increase flexibility and also introduce a ‘Log Analyzer’ to analyse log files in search of errors, and to send alerts to operators under certain circumstances.

Integration of functionality into GUI

Ex Libris have been working on integrating the ILL functionality into the GUI client over the last couple of years. At the moment the ILL GUI lags behind the rest of the clients in terms of look and feel. However, the development of the ILL GUI has been tied up with the development of ISO ILL functionality.

The other functionality they are planning to bring into the GUI is the ‘Course Reading’. This really has been the poor relation module in the past, with a web interface, that doesn’t seem to have been developed at all.

However, Ex Libris are now working with a Course Reading working group to look at outstanding underlying issues and to implement the functionality into the GUI.

This sounds like a great step forward, but I hope they take it further than this, as the current Course Reading functionality falls well short of what we require for our course reading functionality.

ALEPH Publishing

This is the publication of records in MARC XML format. This is to support the implementation of Primo at least, but raises some possibilities of integration with other search engines – e.g. Google Enterprise search etc. It includes expand routines, and includes availability information.

They are also introducing a HTML publication format which could then be indexed by Google or other search engine – with a link back to Aleph. This sounds great (although not sure what Google will make of this?)

This publication process will be based on the OAI publication routines already present.

RFID

Integration of staff user client with RFID hardware.

This will allow the circulation client to directly access the RFID hardware. So far done with Bibliotheca, but they will need to do an integration with each hardware vendor, so it will be necessary to engage with Ex Libris and any hardware vendors you use to see this integration.

So far they can support check-out and check-in actions, and can update information on the RFID tags. This is done via SOAP.

Although this is a modest start, I think this is really exciting. I’m convinced that RFID provides a way of making libraries more efficient in their handling of stock – not just at the circulation end, but also in terms of acquisitions. However, for this to be realised, we need systems to be able to deal with information from RFID tags – to be able to deal with batch processing of items, and to even write information back to the tags – e.g. to say that a book has been processed/invoiced/received etc.

SMS

In v19, Ex Libris are introducing SMS Server Connectivity, with some additional infrastructure in the patron address file …

SRU

In v19 Aleph will support SRU to connect to other databases, currently with the following functions:

searchRetrieve
scan
explain

Not that interesting to us, but good that Ex L are keeping up with this new search protocol.

X-Services

Staff Authentication – to allow libraries to protect web pages with Aleph staff IDs. Generally I wouldn’t think this would be interesting – but the poster session on using php to report from Aleph yesterday used Aleph staff authentication (via the Aleph Staff interface), so I guess it will be of interest to others.

I almost decided to go to the MetaLib/SFX session instead of this, as our Aleph installation is now pretty mature, and I’m having difficulty getting excited by small increments in Aleph functionality.

However, in his opening talk Matti mentioned a couple of things that would be covered to whet my appetite, so while Damyanti is hearing about MetaLib and SFX, I’m in the Aleph session, hoping that it keeps my interest…

Perhaps the most interesting development for us are:

Staff permissions

The first phase of enhancing staff permissions in in v18, this includes extra information about library staff – e.g. expiry dates. This should make the management of staff accounts earlier.

There are further development to come in v19 which look at workflows and processes to grant permissions, rather than very detailed individual bits of functionality.

Staff Interface for Aleph Configuration

This is starting in v18, and continuing in v19. Ex Libris are trying to integrate configuration within the Aleph GUI. This is not just to have the config tables edited via the GUI (which can already be done), but to simplify the process of configuration, with Function/Task oriented workflows, and a more intuitive and graphic UI. All this, of course, appropriately permissioned.

This latter development is something that was tried a few years ago, but didn’t really succeed, as they focussed on just giving a GUI to the text based tables – which didn’t really simplify anything.

In this case they are committed to actually using the interface to help the system administratror – ensuring that information in one table is cross checked with any dependent tables, and that any codes are ‘decoded’ in the GUI (so use descriptions rather than numbers in the the GUI)

As a demonstration of what they are going to do, they have done this for ‘Opening Hours’ (tab17 I think?) in v18. This allows non-systems staff to edit the opening hours.

In v19, they are starting with this new configuration GUI in the Circulation module – it is probably the most complex configuration.

In v19 they are also focussing on the ‘Task Manager’ – to make it easier to use, and view outcomes from the Batch logs. They want to improve the scheduler (job_list) to increase flexibility and also introduce a ‘Log Analyzer’ to analyse log files in search of errors, and to send alerts to operators under certain circumstances.

Integration of functionality into GUI

Ex Libris have been working on integrating the ILL functionality into the GUI client over the last couple of years. At the moment the ILL GUI lags behind the rest of the clients in terms of look and feel. However, the development of the ILL GUI has been tied up with the development of ISO ILL functionality.

The other functionality they are planning to bring into the GUI is the ‘Course Reading’. This really has been the poor relation module in the past, with a web interface, that doesn’t seem to have been developed at all.

However, Ex Libris are now working with a Course Reading working group to look at outstanding underlying issues and to implement the functionality into the GUI.

This sounds like a great step forward, but I hope they take it further than this, as the current Course Reading functionality falls well short of what we require for our course reading functionality.

ALEPH Publishing

This is the publication of records in MARC XML format. This is to support the implementation of Primo at least, but raises some possibilities of integration with other search engines – e.g. Google Enterprise search etc. It includes expand routines, and includes availability information.

They are also introducing a HTML publication format which could then be indexed by Google or other search engine – with a link back to Aleph. This sounds great (although not sure what Google will make of this?)

This publication process will be based on the OAI publication routines already present.

RFID

Integration of staff user client with RFID hardware.

This will allow the circulation client to directly access the RFID hardware. So far done with Bibliotheca, but they will need to do an integration with each hardware vendor, so it will be necessary to engage with Ex Libris and any hardware vendors you use to see this integration.

So far they can support check-out and check-in actions, and can update information on the RFID tags. This is done via SOAP.

Although this is a modest start, I think this is really exciting. I’m convinced that RFID provides a way of making libraries more efficient in their handling of stock – not just at the circulation end, but also in terms of acquisitions. However, for this to be realised, we need systems to be able to deal with information from RFID tags – to be able to deal with batch processing of items, and to even write information back to the tags – e.g. to say that a book has been processed/invoiced/received etc.

SMS

In v19, Ex Libris are introducing SMS Server Connectivity, with some additional infrastructure in the patron address file …

SRU

In v19 Aleph will support SRU to connect to other databases, currently with the following functions:

searchRetrieve
scan
explain

Not that interesting to us, but good that Ex L are keeping up with this new search protocol.

X-Services

Staff Authentication – to allow libraries to protect web pages with Aleph staff IDs. Generally I wouldn’t think this would be interesting – but the poster session on using php to report from Aleph yesterday used Aleph staff authentication (via the Aleph Staff interface), so I guess it will be of interest to others.

Some bits and pieces on development – new modules for ILL and a planned course reading module are coming up. Ex Libris continue to invest in other technology to complement their products (e.g. Lucene and JBoss), and are increasing their use of QA testing tools.

One major development is the Primo product – but more of this later.

Matti is running very (very) quickly over product developments – but too quickly for me to get down. However, there are specific sessions on much of this throughout the day, so I should be able to provide more detail later.

Some bits and pieces on development – new modules for ILL and a planned course reading module are coming up. Ex Libris continue to invest in other technology to complement their products (e.g. Lucene and JBoss), and are increasing their use of QA testing tools.

One major development is the Primo product – but more of this later.

Matti is running very (very) quickly over product developments – but too quickly for me to get down. However, there are specific sessions on much of this throughout the day, so I should be able to provide more detail later.