Digital Libraries: Big Ideas and Small Solutions

Innovations are sorely needed for libraries to compete with Google and Amazon. Big ideas can sketch out the future, while small solutions can—in building block fashion—help develop that future.

By "small solution" I don't mean trivial. Small solutions solve discrete, well-bounded problems and can be pieces of larger solutions. They can move us forward by mixing and matching available components in new and previously unimagined ways.

A number of innovations, which at first glance are completely unrelated, can come together and create important synergies.

A bookmarklet is a small JavaScript program in the form of a link that the user can drag to the bookmark bar in the web browser. Clicking on that link executes the JavaScript program.

InfoWorld columnist Jon Udell created a LibraryLookup bookmarklet that allows someone who finds a book in Amazon, or anywhere an ISBN is present, to click on the bookmarklet and perform an automatic library catalog lookup on that ISBN. Since these are library-specific (the JavaScript needs to know where to send the query), users either need to find your library listed at Udell's web site or use his self-service tool to build a bookmarklet.

OCLC has applied some of the principles laid out in the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions' "Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records" (FRBR) document to the WorldCat database. For more on FRBR and how both OCLC and RLG are using it to remake their systems, read "Not Your Mother's Union Catalog " (see LJ 4/15/03, p. 28).

This means that given a specific copy of a book, you should be able to identify other editions, translations, or printings. This is exactly what OCLC's xISBN service does in a very lightweight fashion. Pass it an ISBN, and it will pass back all ISBNs of all the related items in WorldCat.

Useful on its own, it can be combined with the bookmarklet concept to become part of a compelling library service. Imagine a library user querying a catalog while viewing a book on Amazon and finding any version of that book in the library. Users will be much more successful than if they searched on a specific ISBN. OCLC has combined the xISBN lookup with the bookmarklet concept and as a prototype service is providing bookmarklets tailored to specific libraries on request.

The UK Office of Library Networking (UKOLN) is integrating the xISBN service with its OpenURL resolver. To see it in action, go to the UKOLN Sample Reading List page and click on a link. The resulting OpenURL resolver page displays links for that item but also the message, "It may also be worth checking the following alternative ISBNs."

Andy Powell, UKOLN assistant director, describes this experiment as trying to "show the benefits of services like xISBN being broken out of monolithic applications and exposed on the network for m2m [middleware-to-middleware] use—allowing small functional components offered in one place to be embedded into services delivered elsewhere." These are small solutions that libraries can mix-and-match to make big ideas a reality.

Dan Chudnov, systems programmer at the Yale Center for Medical Informatics, has sketched out a big idea based on small solutions. In "Library Groupware for Bibliographic Lifecycle Management," he describes several technologies that, although unrelated, could be integrated to create a seamless environment to capture, manage, and use personal references to intellectual objects—whether print books or online articles.

Web logs (blogs), OpenURL resolvers, and bibliographic reference managers, he argues, can help form the building blocks of a new infrastructure so users can manage a variety of aspects related to their bibliographic links and references. Moreover, should libraries step up to the plate and create such an infrastructure, we will more effectively embed our services within the everyday life of our clientele.

Chudnov explains his idea much better; I cite his idea as an example of how it sometimes takes small solutions for big ideas to occur to us—or at least to envision how they might effectively work.

Many ideas and innovations may come to nothing in the end, but the few that make it can be worthwhile. For proof we needn't look far: not long ago Tim Berners-Lee came up with a relatively simple idea and called it the World Wide Web.