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.

My wife and I just decided that we would rather live without heat than air conditioning. We decided this after living for four days without it, during the hottest week of the year in Raleigh. A mixture of bad luck and some repairman incompetence made for a very long weekend.

I remember when I first started at NC State, I jokingly asked one of the older staff why everyone in N.C. walked so slow. She replied—quite wisely—that you can separate North Carolinians into two camps: those who lived here before air conditioning and those who moved here after it became pervasive. "If you had moved that fast back then, you would have been dead by 3 p.m.," she quipped. "Of course, you would have been wearing a jacket and tie, too," she added with a wink and a sideways glance at my attire.

All that heat made people slow down. I wonder if that is what is happening to libraries. There's so much going on that we are actually slowing down in hopes of surviving the heat. Google books, RDA, ILS industry shake-ups, new catalogs, 2.0. I think I'll just grab a seat on that bench over there in the shade.

I think we need to change our state of mind a little. Instead of thinking of folks like Google making it too hot, think of them as air conditioning. We don't need them to survive, but they make things more comfortable. They change the pace of life.

Google won't say, but the Economist estimates that it could be scanning 10M books per year. Numbers I heard from the Library of Congress a couple of weeks ago reported 350,000 items cataloged last year. I'll let y'all do some comparative math on that one.

Open Library launched a little while ago. Brewster Kahle's crew wants to digitize and describe all the books. They're snarfing up as many catalog records as they can. This is an interesting cooperative project that is essentially challenging both OCLC and Google. Is this a problem for libraries or an opportunity? Should we be preparing to ship all pre-1923 titles off to remote storage and compact shelving so that we can figure out what to do with the rest of the collections?

Amazon and Kirtas have teamed up with Emory and the University of Maine to cool things off as well. Get ready for more print on demand. Is this an area that libraries would want to wade into on their own? Now, if we can only travel the last hot mile of the e-book journey by convincing publishers that e-books are air conditioning, not more heat (we also need to convince them to make more public roads and less private and exclusive tollways).

When I related the story of my weekend and the sentiment about living without A/C to a complete stranger yesterday, he replied, "Funny thing is you need heat to survive, not air conditioning." We like heat, we need heat, but for now, I'm pretty happy with all the air conditioning.