I always wish that I would put more of my predictions in writing. At least the ones that I ended up being right about. Actually, even being wildly wrong can be fun. Anyway, here's one I predicted, but the formal announcement is missing some of the details that folks might not be aware of.

SirsiDynix, the seemingly last library vendor on the market without a detailed plan for a "next generation catalog," has made an OEM agreement with Brainware for a next-generation faceted search solution. The press release is online (pdf). The release is slated for Summer 2008 . . . I've been griping that 2007 was hardly "next generation" . . . next summer seems a long way off with all the new interfaces that are coming out all over the place.

Brainware technology will provide innovative fuzzy search, fuzzy logic, dynamic categorization, and other capabilities that will empower information seekers to discover more content from more sources—including libraries’ own catalogs, Z39.50 sources, subscription resources, digital collections, crawled web content, subscription content, and social networking data—than ever before.

SirsiDynix is a little late coming into the game with new interfaces, but Brainware looks like solid technology from a company based in one of the technological hotbeds in Northern Virgina . . . my old stomping grounds.

What the press release doesn't mention, but which makes the partnership all the more obvious (logical?) is that Brainware is owned by . . . care to guess? Tick-tock, tick-tock . . . that's right, Vista Equity Partners, the firm that bought SirsiDynix last year. Look here for other potential synergies. I'll let someone else guess the next one.

In other news . . .

. . . tangentially related to SirsiDynix, the firm's old CEO, Patrick Sommers, has landed on his feet at Gale Group. Cengage (does that rhyme with 10-gage?) Learning appointed Sommers president of Gale last month.

I am willing to admit that I remain skeptical about the "one big pile" approach to next generation catalogs that is sweeping the library automation world. While I don't agree that advanced relevance ranking techniques are ineffective on bibliographic records (go look, there is no literature that I can find on this topic...there's tons on full-text, but nothing on surrogate record relevance), I wonder what happens when the catalog becomes more than it used to be.

If a relevance algorithm is based on whether or not a library holds a title, what happens when an article is thrown in the mix? How does/will Google's relevance algorithm work when the body of content is 20M books and 20M articles?

One development I am encouraged by comes from our friends at Bowker Syndetics, the folks who have been enriching catalog records for several years now. Traditionally, catalog enrichment with things like book jackets, Tables of Contents (TOCs), reviews, etc., is done on the fly by tying content to something like an ISBN. Of course, the problem with enriching records on the fly is that the content of the enrichment is not part of the retrieval process.

Traditionally, the way around this has been to dump tons of data into the MARC record itself—the perfect example of tradition stunting progress. Our profession's obsession with "the record"—not MARC, but the record itself—has led to missed opportunities, both philosophical and technological.

Syndetics now has an interesting compromise, called ICE (Indexed Content Enrichment). What if you could have all the enrichment and index it with your MARC data? New catalogs—AquaBrowser, Endeca, Primo, and Encore—will certainly help this idea along. It may even be what led Bowker to see Medialab (creator of AquaBrowser) as a nice little acquisition opportunity.

Calling all researchers! Let's not make the mistake that some of the vendors and showroom floor demo wizards are. We need more research in this area. Indexing first chapters, reviews, tables of contents, flyleafs, and annotations—and turning media awards and fiction files into faceted navigation elements—does not necessarily improve relevance ranking. It can provide recall where there was none before, but relevance is something different. And how will any of this compare with full-text (especially book-length text) relevance ranking?

Is Bowker onto something? I got to thinking about all the hub-bub over BISAC codes in the public library space. Then I thought about Bowker owning Books in Print and all this enrichment content. They and others are also heavily involved in the ONIX standard for publishers. Then I recalled that AquaBrowser has a deal with LibraryThing for tagging and other content. Throw in a little ICE and you've got a pretty interesting cocktail, making this a more intriguing battle:

BIP + ONIX + BISAC + ICE + LibraryThing vs. MARC

Throw in all the full text that is coming at us and all bets could be off. Think about the fact that Bowker is part of the Cambridge Information Group which also owns CSA, ProQuest IL, and RefWorks; and now Bowker owns AquaBrowser. Boy, all Bowker needs is an ILS for a soup-to-nuts package. I reckon there's one or two for sale out there.

No, I did not drop off the face of the planet, and I recognize that 13 days without a post is the blogospheric equivalent of digital disappearance. Vacation, followed by vacation recovery, was the cause of my absence. Summer is coming to an end. Classes at NCSU start today. My kids go back to elementary school next week. We made it through another summer. In the meantime, there have been some library automation happenings of note.

I think we made it through the entire summer season without the loss, merger, or acquisition of a single ILS entity! Some attrition at ILS giant SirsiDynix continues, but the firm did appoint a new COO. Matthew Hawkins will be responsible for the company’s Client Care, Implementation, and Consulting & Education organizations. He will be based in Provo, Utah.

A long, hot summer still has room for some acquisitions. The Berkeley Electronic Press (BePress) announced that it would be purchasing Digital Commons, a turnkey Institutional Repository (IR) solution, from ProQuest. This is not a huge surprise given the rise in IR awareness and the fact that BePress created the software in the first place.

Don't go thinking that ProQuest is going anywhere. On one of its many other fronts, AquaBrowser (owned by Bowker, which is owned by ProQuest) announced today that it would be setting up dedicated sales and support in North America, namely New York City. And who better to lead that group than the person who led AquaBrowser sales for The Library Corporation? Jimmy Thomas, former Director of Strategic Products with TLC, will become the AquaBrowser Library Product Director, North America. Of course, this does reposition TLC's exclusive distributorship deal with Medialab, the former owner of the AquaBrowser software. Quoting from the release:

"The Library Corporation will remain an external AquaBrowser distribution partner of Medialab in the U.S. and Canada. New AquaBrowser customers now have the choice to purchase AquaBrowser either directly through the new dedicated AquaBrowser team in the U.S., or through the proven services from The Library Corporation."

It seems moderately odd that AquaBrowser would juxtapose its "new-ness" against TLC's "proven-ness." But who am I to judge? AquaBrowser has even more to be happy about with the incorporation of LibraryThing data in its interface.

Making stranger bedfellows is a deal between Care Affiliates and WebFeat for the latter to provide its library of database connectors for Index Data's Masterkey federated search solution. This could very well be a model for open source and proprietary software collaboration, in that open source metasearch solutions have a "last mile" problem in connecting to databases for which there is no standard connection protocol. Whether the connectors themselves will now be available as open source remains to be seen.

Seems like a guy can barely put a print column to bed before there's another change in the library automation landscape. Back (and exhausted) from ALA, I gleefully submitted my column copy for the August issue of the magazine (during the day even, and not the few minutes before midnight on the day of my deadline as usual) when what should appear but another press release from OCLC. With this much e-mail, Bob Murphy should be on my buddy list!

OCLC has just purchased the remaining shares of OCLC PICA, the European arm of the library cooperative. OCLC PICA was formed as an organization in 2002, two years after OCLC acquired a majority of shares (60%) in PICA. Cooperation between the two entities was already decades old when that deal was struck. This deal, the value of which is unreported (but which is likely forthcoming), gives OCLC the remaining 40%.

Rein van Charldorp will continue as managing director at PICA. OCLC recently reorganized its management structure "to achieve global integration of services and to establish teams comprised of staff from various geographic locations." Clearly there is more to internationalization than North America and Europe, but OCLC is on its way to establishing a truly global strategy.

This latest step will not be without controversy, though. PICA has been a main instrument for acquiring pieces of a large library automation picture that make some question the cooperative's not-for-profit status. Talis's Paul Miller already blogged on that subject today.

Just when you thought things could not get more interesting . . .