By way of follow-up to an e-mail thread kicked off a month or so ago by
Paul Miller, I wanted to update the list with outputs from a Research Day
that was held at Talis on 14th June. Paul’s original e-mail raised the
question of how the library community was making its presence more visible
in a web environment. A lively interaction ensued which I think
demonstrates that this is very much an area of interest for many
organisations at a local, regional and national level. Talis have just
released a White Paper on this very concern entitled “In the age of
Google, Amazon and MSN, why is content in the library domain still so
difficult and expensive to discover, access and share?” You can download
this White Paper at:
http://silkworm.talis.com/_downloads/white_papers/silkworm_paper_13_06_2005
.pdf. This area of research activity has a project name, it’s called
Silkworm and you can also monitor our activity in this area by following
the Silkworm blog at: http://silkworm.talis.com/blog/
There did seem to be a sense from the last thread on this subject that
this work is being done by individual organisations already and so why
does it need to be addressed as a community initiative? Well, to quote
John Usher:
“Do we, as librarians see some intrinsic value in repeating this work? Do
we see it as deskilling to go the automated route? Are there, in
fact ,personal, professional or commercial reasons/divides which push us
towards re-inventing the wheel? I say 'Write-Once - Publish Many…”
This I guess leaves me with the issue of addressing why Talis in all of
this? I can well understand that there may be a suspicion that we are
seeking to exploit some kind of business opportunity out of this idea,
after all we are a commercial organisation. But from Talis’ point of
view, we come at this with an understanding of the problem based on our
core business of library systems, we want to build solutions that are
resilient, robust, current and sustainable into the future that are not
likely to disappear if the funding or political will no longer allows.
Also, I would say, where would be the benefit in trying to build a shared
infrastructure which enabled libraries to make their content accessible to
all, if we then sought to build walls around it? The only way to foster
participation in this kind of venture is if we collaborate and lower the
barriers or objections to working in this way. This means that we want to
collaborate with those organisations in the commercial sector that would
have traditionally been described as our competitors. Perhaps the
greatest barrier to removing walls or eradicating a silo mentality in a
web environment will be to engage with our competitors in the LMS sector.
So, I would like to issue a general invitation to all, we have another
Talis Research Day on 19th July, which we would welcome your input to. If
you would like more information or would like to register to attend,
please e-mail [log in to unmask] . Paul Miller attended the last event and you
can find his write-up of it at: http://www.common-
info.org.uk/thoughts/archives/2005/06/silkworm_unlock.html.
And if you really want to get to the crux of the matter and understand
what it could mean for your institution, there are some cool demos at:
http://silkworm.talis.com/examples/index.html, that show what you can do
with a directory service when you layer applications like Google Maps on
top of it, and that’s just the beginning.
Thanks for reading.
Fiona Leslie
Product Manager, Talis
T: 0870 400 5061
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