Discovery Marketplace Is Red Hot at ALA
Edited by Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 8/15/2009
If librarians even whispered the word discovery on the exhibit floor at the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in Chicago, they'd hear back a chorus of pitches likely to include the words unified, integrated, platform, and interface. This discovery product game of Marco Polo means good things for libraries: lots of product innovation and serious competition for scarce budget dollars.
Summon, announced by Serials Solutions in January, upped the ante on discovery software—generally taken to mean software that provides normalized access to content from disparate resources—with its inclusion of a massive amount of preindexed metadata from content providers and database aggregators like LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Gale, and ProQuest.
Since then, a number of other companies have entered the fray. In April, EBSCO announced its own aggregate index product, EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), to complement its EBSCOhost Integrated Search federated search tool. EDS will similarly offer the speed advantages and search refinement pluses made possible by an aggregate index of database content.
At ALA, EBSCO filled LJ in on its plan to offer, at no cost to EBSCO subscribers, a Basic Discovery Index that will include the articles and abstracts of EBSCO databases as well as TOC content from thousands of journals. For an additional cost, libraries can subscribe to the Discovery Index Upgrade, which will cover metadata from other publishers such as LexisNexis, Newsbank, Readex, and Alexander Street Press. Further for-fee options are the ability to include local catalog and/or digital collection records. Look for the EDS rollout in December.
OCLC is another contender on the discovery front with its WorldCat Local Quickstart, offered at no additional charge to subscribers of FirstSearch. OCLC describes it as the first step toward the web-scale integrated library system it is releasing, which was also much-discussed at ALA (see below for more).
The latest player to strike a deal with content providers to create an aggregate index discovery product is Ex Libris, which announced Primo Central at the conference. Primo Central will extend the Primo discovery architecture to include aggregate indexed metadata from content providers such as EBSCO, Alexander Street Press, Project MUSE, the National Academy of Sciences, PubMed, and others. The beta release of Primo Central is planned for late 2009.
Look for all of these services to tout more agreements in the weeks and months ahead.
Local discovery
Development on the local discovery side continues, with a number of products that return results for catalog contents, digital collections, and more. SirsiDynix announced Enterprise version 3.0, due out in September, with features focusing on customizability and flexibility in terms of integration with local contents and materials.
Encore from Innovative Interfaces has seen a number of recent adoptions, most prominently in the New York Public Library's massive project to combine the contents of its Branch and Research Libraries under a single interface (see NewsDesk, p. 11).
Beyond the OPAC
As evidenced by all these showcased products, nearly every vendor is working on improving discovery of materials for end users, especially as library customers demand more than just the display of basic bibliographic information. The continued popularity of stand-alone products such as AquaBrowser demonstrates this, as does the increasing number of discovery features integrated into OPAC products from companies like VTLS, TLC, Polaris, and Auto-Graphics.
Auto-Graphics at ALA marked the commercial release of its Agent-Iluminar front end, built using an Adobe Flex framework. The catalog interface boasts a number of visually appealing user enticements, such as browsing of book jackets among search results (mimicking iTunes' cover flow), and the ability to drag and drop search results into lists. The interface currently integrates only with Auto-Graphics products, but the company indicated that the software's framework could extend the product to other library systems.
Finally, VTLS announced Chamo, “a new social OPAC with Drupal support,” featuring personalized touches like saved searches and RSS feed alerts, built to support thousands of simultaneous users.
Forging Ahead on Software
ALA also saw the release and announcement of many other products, as well as more details on some long-awaited projects.
SirsiDynix debuted version 3.3 of its Symphony ILS, an incremental update heavily focused on “increasing overall staff efficiency,” according to the company, including a new tool for ordering materials from vendors and an “enhanced usability wizard” to guide staff through difficult or repetitive tasks. The company also discussed continuing work on improving access to systems data with continued development on web services APIs for products like Symphony and Enterprise.
Innovative Interfaces announced its statistics and usage analysis product, Encore Reporter. It will offer features such as faceted navigation of stats results, as well the ability to “drill down” from broad collection snapshots to narrow subsets limited by material or user characteristics. The product was designed with mashups in mind and already features nice integration with Google Maps for a more visual look at who's borrowing what and where. Reporter will be available in the fall. In addition, Innovative's Content Pro—the firm's digital repository software—is now in general release, adding another option for libraries wanting to expose their digital collections online.
Toward a new LIS
Inching toward the future, both OCLC and Ex Libris offered glimpses into their upcoming ILS products. Ex Libris told LJ of the first partners it has lined up to help in design efforts toward its Unified Resource Management (URM) framework, including Boston College, Princeton University, and K.U. Leuven in Belgium. In addition, focus groups will explore specific topics, like metadata management, selection and acquisitions, and fulfillment.
Similarly, OCLC shed a little more light on its “web-scale” ILS announced in April. The cooperative hopes to have the circulation component done in 2009, with acquisitions and license management in 2010, and a final rollout of the system in 2011.
If the casual conversations among conference attendees are any indicator, open source ILS offerings have come a long way and are now being considered as viable alternatives by an ever-increasing number of libraries.
Bellwether installations of Evergreen (executed by Equinox Software) garnered numerous mentions, with the buzz about the growing number of larger public libraries in Michigan and Indiana making the switch. Librarians were also quick to point out the inroads LibLime has made, particularly with a number of recent Koha installations at academic libraries.
