We hope you enjoy this presentation, Trends from the Front Lines of Change, which will give you a taste of what’s coming next in the online world.

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You’ve just experienced a common ailment called the blog lull, familiar to many as a symptom of life getting very busy for that blogger. In this case our lull was a result of the preparation for and multitude of questions subsequent to the annual Innovative Users Group conference. We had a great time getting to talk with librarians and hear what everyone’s been working on and wants to see us working on next. Now that we’ve begun to surface from the post-conference piles of email you can expect to see more happening here on the blog again.

Back before the IUG conference though, were two interesting ones I attended in March: South By Southwest Interactive and NISO Discovery. In a separate post, I’ll bring you the technology trends highlights from SXSW, but first I want to talk a bit about the Discovery ‘08 conference.

I was very impressed by how much was fit into this two-day forum. The title was “Next Generation Discovery Tools: New Tools, Aging Standards” and the speakers covered a good overview from that central point about what’s happening with discovery tools and where they impact information standards.

Here are a few highlights to give you a taste of this fascinating meeting of the minds.

Richard Ackerman of NRC CISTI delighted me by bringing Ranganathan into the API world with his principles “Every web resource its machine reader” and “Save the time of the machine”. One thing about next generation interfaces is the whole user category of non-humans they may integrate or interact with.

The potential for exposing more metadata from datasets within documents was raised by Robert J. Sandusky of University of Illinois in Chicago in his discussion of deep indexing of tables and figures. This is a level of granularity below the usual focus of libraries, but certainly one of interest to patrons in many academic and business contexts.

There was a nice concise overview of the next generation catalog landscape from Peter Murray of OhioLINK. Interestingly he chose one of our non-Millennium systems for his Encore examples which was fun to see presented by someone other than me.

There were many more sessions and great conversation over lunch. I definitely recommend this conference to others with a keen interest in the intersection of metadata, standards, and technology.

And I’ll close with a great quote from John Dove of Credo Reference which reminded us of how accustomed we can become to our special vocabulary to the point where we’re out of sync with what will help our users take advantage of the tools we provide: “I no longer use the word database because my wife doesn’t use it.”

Most Innovative Implementation of eResource Discovery

Birmingham Public Library (AL) was recognized for using WebBridge LR (Link Resolver) to link to Amazon.com for e-resource discovery in WebPAC Pro, Innovative’s online catalog product.

Most Innovative Staff Program

Las Vegas-Clark County Library District (NV) won first-place honors for “Concierge Key with Self-Check.” This innovation allows library staff to work more efficiently with third-party self-check workstations.

The second place award was presented to West Palm Beach Public Library (FL) for developing a training Wiki that includes technology competencies for various topics including Millennium.

Most Innovative WebPAC

Mid-Hudson Library System (NY) accepted first place honors for their New Kids Catalog, which takes advantage of features and customization opportunities in the new KidsOnline product.

The Watzek Library of Lewis and Clark College (OR) tied for second place for Most Innovative WebPAC. The College was recognized for their “Easy Course Reserves Requesting,” which enables instructors find an item in the catalog and automatically generate an email to the circulation department reserving the item and indicating course number and loan period.

“Implementation of AirPAC” also earned New Zealand’s Libraries for a Greater Auckland Region (eLGAR) second-place recognition. Library staff created a Flash-driven “web tour” to promote the launch of AirPAC, Innovative’s wireless online catalog application for small-screen devices.

Most Innovative Patron Services

Ryerson University Library (Canada) won first-place honors for applications that enable users to access the library website, including WebPAC Pro, from their page on the Facebook social-networking website.

Recognized in second place, Hong Kong Baptist University Library staff used the Millennium Patron API to integrate user-specific notices from the library into iCalendar-compatible applications.

Jerry Kline, Innovative’s Chairman and CEO (center), presented the “Starfire” crystal awards to representatives of the winning libraries…

Left to right: Jim Hayes, Regional Branch Services Director, Las Vegas-Clark County Library District; Barbara Storch, Technical Services Manager, West Palm Beach Public Library (FL); Tobin Cataldo, Information Systems Manager, Birmingham Public Library (AL); Jerry Kline, Chairman and CEO, Innovative Interfaces; Hamish McDonald, Director, eLGAR (New Zealand); Graham McCarthy, Multimedia Developer, Ryerson University Library (Canada); and Laurie Shedrick, Automated Systems Manager, Mid-Hudson Library System (NY).

You can check out all the ceremony pictures on Flickr. For more on the IUG check out their website.

See you next year!

Innovative considers its commitment of resources carefully. We abstained for what I believe to be a good reason: that without having worked out the details, we simply were not sure what we would be committing to. The participants at this meeting had greatly varying needs and expectations for what the ILS-DI would mean to them. Some, while endorsing, even went so far as to endorse “not just what is on the table”. Not to be too flip, but OCLC has endorsed this document. Does this then mean that we’ll all soon be harvesting WorldCat at our whim? Maybe not.

It’s unclear, at this point, what the endorsement of any of the participants really means or how an endorsement differs from abstention when it comes right down to it. We agreed that this is an area of interest and further discussion. As was indicated in the post’s response thread, our abstention was made with comments that said:

“We generally agree with the comments expressed by our colleagues that there is a significant amount of work involved in fully describing the details of a meaningful interoperability mechanism between ILS and discovery. At the same time, we feel that expressing a position on the proposal without the benefit of fully understanding such details is premature. As a result, we respectfully abstain from commenting on the proposal at this time.”

What was left out was our email’s closing line:

“We look forward to hearing more on this proposal in the near future.”

Abstaining was not saying “no”. Abstaining was saying that, at this point, we didn’t want to pretend to commit resources to a project that was so early in its life cycle. We are supportive of this venture, but feel an endorsement of this proposal at such an early and undefined state is not in anyone’s best interest.

The easiest answer is that the customer is the one paying the bills and yet that’s who I’ve been listening to for years only to find out (if all of you other bloggers are to be believed) we’ve gotten it all wrong. I think the answer is that my customers are a community that includes both the librarians with all of their specialized needs and the patrons who have, sometimes, completely opposite needs. It takes a partnership that includes both camps to create products that really work.

Sometimes it’s good to have your head served to you on a plate. It’s a great way to clean the slate. While it’s true that mud has been slung at the ILS vendors I think many in the library world have taken their fair share of ownership of the problems and embraced the challenge of thinking differently and working differently. For me, the development of Encore has been an amazing opportunity to work closely with libraries trying to create change. But beyond that we’ve been given an incredible amount of feedback directly from their patrons. We’re all working together and it works! Who woulda thunk it?

I realize this isn’t radical thinking and you could find this same message any number of other places on the web. But it’s important because it isn’t easy to break out of our routines. It is even harder to keep from slipping back into them. As the technologies and trends come and go I believe we’ll all continue to be successful if we stay focused on this 3-way customer partnership. If we continue to create products including all the partners we can’t fail.

Since preservation is an obsession of librarians, Scott’s biography is interesting:

Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in the printing trade and as a LIBRARIAN (emphasis mine). He published a book on the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he railed against Edison for “appropriating” his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but “writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means.”

But is it really a sound recording or a transcription of sound that was never intended to be played…?

Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered.

Granted, preservation of digital formats is a serious concern, but who knows if one day there will be a way to play back data that no longer has a player to play it? Or that seems damaged beyond repair. Some awfully smart people are already trying.

You know the expression, “If walls could talk?” Maybe walls will talk one day. Maybe we’ll be able to play back conversations that take place in a room by scanning the paint. Shudder to think!

Example of an ancient playing device from 1976 a.d. The Panasonic boom box prototype. It played something called “cassette tapes.” (The final product spread hip-hop around NYC… “You know I can’t live without my radio!”)

Librarian trumps Edison? Scott seems to think he did. At any rate I’m curious about what folks think about this article…I’m sure there are tons of people in the library world that know more about preservation than I.

Come see Express Lane work, this week, at PLA 2008 (booth #1201).

In my spare time, I do some web design and I try to keep up on the cool, new technologies that are out there! Lately, JQuery is on the top of my list of favorite tools!

I plan to blog a bit about web design and hopefully share some tricks and tips I’ve picked up along the way!

Here’s a podcast we created so you can learn a bit more about internationalization and localization, in general, and the translation process for Innovative products.