It was about eight years ago this fall that I sat down to make my very first attempt at professional writing. I submitted my very first column for "Coming Full Circle" in Computers in Libraries. I probably shouldn't admit this, but I think I worked harder on that column than on any one since, with the possible exception of my very first column for American Libraries. I'm happy to say that the CIL article on digital preservation still has legs. I'm a little sad for digital preservation that the article still has legs.

I was pretty good in those days at making outlandish predictions about library technology, some of which were right on the mark, but I thought for sure that the digital preservation topic would be such a moving target as to render its content obsolete in a matter of a year or two. The problem, of course, as with many good things in this world, is that preservation is expensive and the return on the investment is quite distant.

I don't mean to suggest that nothing has changed in nearly a decade. I'm merely pointing out that the long-term benefit requires a long-term plan. We also need to keep in mind that the vendors that will involve themselves in this area will require short-to-medium-term returns on their prospects.

Most vendors cannot even think in the terms dictated by preservation needs. I recall talking to a representative from Adobe back around the time I wrote that first column. He told the story of asking the National Archives how long the files had to last. The NARA employee answered flatly, "Until the end of the Republic." Of course what seemed like a joke at the time was an important precursor to PDF for Long-term Preservation.

How sustainable is long-term preservation? And who does one turn to when trying to find expensive solutions to problems that the average person would barely acknowledge? Or, in this case, to answer the question of just how expensive the endeavor is? Grant funders. And thanks to the generous support of the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we can look forward to an answer from the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Digital Preservation and Access. The task force—co-chaired by Fran Berman, cyberinfrastructure expert and director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California–San Diego, and Brian Lavoie, an economist, preservation expert, and research scientist with OCLC—will convene an international panel of experts to develop actionable recommendations on economic sustainability of digital information for the science and engineering, cultural heritage, academic, public, and private sectors.

Like good librarians, we have already done a fair amount of work on digital preservation standards, such as PREMIS. The addition of this work could go a long way toward determining the long-term sustainability of libraries' and archives' substantial investments in and careful planning for the future.

I will admit that I used to be pretty down on virtual reference. When the notion that librarians could get on board with unsolicited virtual conversation first started, the grandiose nature of the uptake—punctuated by conferences, scholarly articles, and prolonged navel-gazing discussion of this supposed paradigm shift—made one think that librarians had invented online chat.

As with most things of this nature, a cottage industry emerged to support the library clamor for virtual reference (I know some vendors really hate it when I refer to their bread and butter as a cottage industry, but, well . . . tough). There are many solutions out there—Velaro, QuestionPoint, Tutor.com (more emphasis on the tutoring services these days, it appears), Docutek (a SirsiDynix company with emphasis on lots of other stuff), and probably a dozen more I don't know about that are free to add themselves to comments on this post.

But now, rather than pretending to have invented chat, some libraries are reverse-engineering the best parts of the products that are out there. For instance, at MPOW, we found that co-browsing wasn't really the greatest thing since sliced bread. In my opinion, the need to co-browse is a mark of a badly organized website. That is, if you have to walk someone through "how do I find articles?" then there is something more deeply wrong with your website than a failure to offer good virtual reference.

Why not simply IM? It's not necessarily an offering that is mutually exclusive from virtual reference services, but it can be cheap (even $0) at startup, and popular. Several libraries, including mine, are offering IM service via multiple protocols—AIM, MSN, Google, etc. Others are taking things one step further by embedding the Meebo widget right into the "contact us" portion of the website. Here's a list of libraries doing that.

Our profession has been talking a lot lately about centralization of cataloging efforts, digital library efforts, and even IT services. In retrospect, the conversation about centralized reference services was a bit premature, but a new distributed—but as yet unmanaged—infrastructure seems to be emerging. (Perhaps a new cottage industry opportunity?)

I have to admit that there's a part of me that would love to sit down for an hour and just ask random questions about these things. If thousands of us could do it all at the same time, it would be great way to test the scale of virtual reference support. I love reference librarians because I've never met one who could resist even the most esoteric question.

What was the GDP of Paraguay in 1994 anyway? I'm gonna go play.

Is change really good? This is one of those phrases that is spoken like a truism. I wish it was one of those phrases that had been bastardized, like "money is the root of all evil." Actually, "the love of money is the root of all evil" is more correct. Let me try this: "The love of change is the root of all disorder."

Of course, I say this with a love of disorder. I believe that some of us are drawn to librarianship not out of a penchant for organizing things or out of some deep-seated anal- retentiveness (though I sorta have those, too). What we actually embrace is disorder and chaos. We are not nearly as organized as we like to think we are.

And boy are things chaotic now. I wanted to write about change today, because I still think change is good. I was surprised to see my colleague Roy Tennant caution against change recently: "I wouldn't want to change vendors now for the world. For those of you who can wait for a bit, I think now is a great time to do exactly that." His points about upheaval and the tenuous state of some of the vendors are spot on, but as a prognosticator in this market, I'm not sure I see things calming down anytime soon.

1. Waiting to choose the "right system" is like waiting for the right time to get married, have a baby, buy a house, change jobs...are you prepared to wait forever?


2. I've tried to put my money where my mouth is before. If one believes that the ILS is a commodity, what is the harm in choosing one over the other? If an end-of-life was declared for yours tomorrow, what would you do? I see lots of libraries out there that might as well have an end-of-life system based on what they are doing with it. (This is not meant to be a completely negative statement. Lots of us have better things to do than muck with a system that isn't completely broken.) The system you have might not have a future, but if it didn't work, you'd be frantic for a replacement.


3. I guarantee that hindsight will always be 20-20. Buyers remorse will set in. Beatification of the old system is a natural stage of change.

I've met the new heads at SirsiDynix and Ex Libris North America. Good guys. Without being too critical of their predecessors, I think they get the market that they have entered. I hope we're past the whole "what do they know about libraries" whining. At worst, anyone new to this market knows as little about libraries as libraries know about business. And this is, at the end of the day, business. I've told them both directly that they have to get a message out, not just to their customers but to their staff. More on that in a minute.

In the meantime, their competition is hardly slowing down or waiting for the dust to settle. In just the last couple weeks, LibLime has signed the INCOLSA consortium in Indiana and the Central Kansas Library Consortium. Other vendors are marketing themselves as the "stable choice." Frankly, I don't think stability automatically extends to those who have not had a big shake-up. Sometimes, on the contrary, they are simply next on the list for change. (This is only a general prediction and is not aimed at any particular vendor.)

I think "the money people" entering this market can be in danger of thinking they are getting into the software business when what they might really be buying is a relationship company. If your library falls under #2 above, then your vendor is in the relationship business. Would that more next-generation software came out of the library automation marketplace; but I still believe that it does not have to come from there. What these companies need now is strong leadership. Some of them have credibility issues to deal with as well. Combining good leadership, good standing, and good software is a tall order.

Maybe I love disorder because I see it as job security. For many others, it is the status quo and has meant security, but not so in IT. I think it's worth reading what the director of the Digital Library Federation thinks about the status quo. There's some provocative stuff in there. I agree 100% with 75% of it. Or maybe I agree 75% with 100% of it. I'm not quite sure.

Maybe it's better to say that the hatred of change is the beginning of disaster.

Since I've said it a few times, I thought I would get it down in print before it got taken out of context or worse. "Interoperability is the biggest lie in automation today." The word is thrown around as easily and meaninglessly as "friend." Interoperable is, at best, an adjective for standards-based systems, and at worst, a hack to cover up the fact that different systems are not at all meant to speak to one another. The former case is so rare as to make it the exception; the latter case is perpetual job security for systems people.

interoperability
Function: noun
: ability of a system (as a weapons system) to work with or use the parts or equipment of another system
—Webster's Online

I'm not sure why Webster's chose weapons when online systems would have made a good example; perhaps they wanted to emphasize the interoperability of pieces and parts, though computer hardware would have done okay for that. In fact, hardware interoperability is much less of a lie than software interoperability. Systems folk are much more used to after-market memory, cables, etc. We're spoiled now by the (nearly) Universal Serial Bus. But the time is not so distant that we should have forgotten that hardware used to be as proprietary as most software.

Why am I so worked up about this? Well, first of all, I care about standards, and interoperability without standards is more often than not an end-run around them. Second, unlike loose use of the word "friend," interoperability can cost time and money. It's the same reason I object to the oft-overused "automagically." In my experience, there's no magic in IT—just lots of hard work. The more we describe it as magic, the less respect there is for hard work.

So what? Well, I've been advocating breaking systems apart for some time now. The dis-integrated library system is reality—the classic ILS, link resolving, metasearch, ERM, patron self-service, digital asset management, CRM (e.g. PeopleSoft, Banner), "next-gen" catalog interfaces. Would you believe someone who told you they had a Shangri La where all these pieces interoperate? I'm generally skeptical in thinking that any two of them can. Sometimes a little skepticism can be healthy.