I got an e-mail today from the RedLightGreen team at RLG. RedLightGreen provided inspiration and set the bar in many respects long before anyone had uttered the words "next generation catalog." The much-lauded interface to the research union catalog is fading away in the wake of the OCLC RLG merger. Fortunately, this is not as much a deprecation as it is a passing of the baton to WorldCat.org, which launched in beta status last month. WorldCat includes both the faceted navigation and "Editions" feature (tying like titles together into a single record display) made popular by RedLightGreen.

The second mouse gets the cheese. OCLC might have been 2nd to RLG with this technical advancement, but with its wealth of content that now includes RLG's holdings, WorldCat is destined to be (it already was and is) a database of tremendous impact. And if the world's books were not enough, WorldCat now includes many electronic serials holdings as well. Serials Solutions, EBSCO, and TDNet have partnered with their customers and OCLC to participate in the eSerials project, launched in July 2006. Through the project, libraries can contribute their electronic holdings to WorldCat. Serials Solutions joins EBSCO and TDNet as a contributor to the database.

It's hard to imagine at first what the contribution of locally licensed collections is to the open world catalog, but in combination with other initiatives such as Resource Sharing and Collection Analysis from OCLC, it makes more sense. Having "all the stuff" in one place does have some payoffs. It also gives libraries (more) incentive to pursue less complex (that's a euphemism for less restrictive) licensing agreements with content providers. Otherwise all those shared holdings become just a tease without the mechanisms to share them with other libraries. The groundwork has certainly been laid.

Okay, so I heard it second hand--I was nowhere near Seoul, Korea, for the 72nd IFLA conference (I’ve only been to IFLA once. . .when it was in Boston) when Sungdae Ahn, vice president and general manager of EBSCO Information Services-Korea, said, “Service, not content, is the new king.” While she might not have been the first to use that phrase, I’m not quite sure what I think of it.

I will give EBSCO their props for creating some pretty innovative services for the content that they already govern. A partnership with WebFeat has increased metasearch access for EBSCO A-Z (another EBSCO service). The EBSCONET Subscription Management System now supports 17 languages (including Korean).

I really like EBSCO's NextReads, a new NoveList service that NoveList's creator Duncan Smith was kind enough to show me at the last ALA. NextReads is a readers' advisory service that taps into the long tail concept to suggest titles to subscribers. And lest we forget, EBSCO has lots of content.

Don’t get me wrong, I love online services. As a systems librarian, they are largely my stock in trade. But the librarian in me is not ready to dethrone content. Maybe it’s self-preservation kicking in, because I worry that (at least on the internet) our services don’t always measure up to our dot-com brethren.

At the risk of sounding a bit wishy-washy, I’m happy that the bar has been raised for online library services-—better catalogs, online chat, better system interoperability, expanded uses for the OpenURL, and so on. But without content, it all seems rather pointless. And, no, I don’t really think this is in the “chicken and the egg” category. Good service is key, but content is still king--long may it reign.

A colleague of mine likes to joke about something he calls "MetaMeetings" ...meetings about meetings. Organizations (especially academic ones, it seems) like to have those. So I was wondering what a blog post about meta stuff should be called. There are many meta things happening out there.

EBSCO has announced that eight new publishers have added journal content to MetaPress, their electronic content management and hosting service. This got me thinking about institutional repositories, a topic I have been able to mostly avoid (beyond hating that horrible name). When I have turned my attention to it, I am always surprised at just how many commercial solutions are cropping up for repositories. Fodder for another post, perhaps.

Webfeat is making things hundreds of percent better with its "next generation federated search proxy." How long is a generation in library technology, anyway? But seriously, this looks pretty neat because it preserves native interface features in the metasearch product. I've always been pretty firmly in the "good enough" camp of metasearch, but publishers and many librarians have been fighting hard to preserve branding (the content provider's concern) and native interface features (the librarian's concern). Ever the lover of irony, I revel in the fact that it took the introduction of metasearch for librarians to beatify publishers' native interfaces.

Finally, lest we forget the valiant efforts of NISO's Metasearch Initiative (disclosure: I was co chair of this group, along with Jenny Walker, now of XRefer). Many folks probably don't realize the fruits of this group's labor, and that the work actually still continues:

• An excellent document on authentication in a metasearch environment, published as an article by Mike Teets (OCLC) and Peter Murray (OhioLink) in D-Lib.
• Two draft standards for trial use on Collection and Service Description.
• An implementer's guide to the NISO Metasearch XML Gateway (affectionately called MXG by the group), a lightweight alternative to Z39.50 for content providers. IndexData and Ex Libris have already successfully demonstrated the new gateway procedure.