ELUNA 2006

 

I am currently blogging from ELUNA 2006 in Knoxville, TN. My colleague and I arrived last night at about 10 PM, and we had to be up pretty early for breakfast this morning because the sessions begin at 8:30. This morning in the plenary sessions we heard from Matti Shem Tov, President and CEO of Ex Libris, and Dan Trajman, president of Ex Libris, Inc., the North American division of EL. Some interesting stats came out of the presentations. EL picked up 257 new customers in the past year. They currently have at least one product at 85 of 123 of the advanced research libraries (ARL).

Each EL product (Aleph, MetaLib, SFX, Verde, and Digitool) has seen a new release in the last year. Tov talked about several new developments in their products (Paul, you will love the fact that MetaLib is going to be using Vivisimo to cluster).

Dan Trajman talked about the second phase of partnership with institutions who want to use Primo. Currently one German university and two American universities (Vanderbilt and University of Minnesota) are testing the product. The next wave of testing will involve institutions who want to commit to a 2 year relationship with EL for testing Primo. In return, the institutions will get to influence the product, preferred pricing terms, and early access to Primo. Those who test must agree to be at various meetings, give feedback, serve as a reference site, and agree to be willing to speak at public engagements. It sounds like alot of work, but its probably the only way to implement Primo at an institution within the next year.

Liveblogging the Primo Webinar

I will continually be updating this post during the webinar. Tamar Sadeh is leading the seminar. If you miss the webinar, Ex Libris is archiving it.

• User expectations
  • Users expect sites like Google, Answers.com, Del.icio.us
  • Google ranking helps users find what they need quickly
  • Google provides links to resources that they think are unessential
  • These type of sites have high tolerance, spelling correctors, did you mean, etc.
  • Amazon has personalized results
  • Sites like Scirus let you drill down into results
  • Del.icio.us allows you to tag, offers alternative ways of viewing results.
  • Amazon suggests what similar items other users have viewed
• Facts about users
  • Users typically begin searching for information with a search engine, especially college users.
  • They believe this is so because
    • user information is outdated
    • information is not consolidated
  • Karen Calhoun of Cornell has called for change in OPACs
  • UCal says something similar

[Drat! I lost the feed. This thing takes forever to get back into!]

[Drat again. I can't get back in. No, wait, I am in. Just picking up where I came back in now.]

• Primo harvests information from several types of sources and is in one interface.
• It allows you to group similar items. You can ignore, view all, etc.
• Simple display. It has more curves than a 55 Chevy!
• Provides an interface where users can find, not just search.
• Will take users to homepage of online journals using SFX
• Integrates with DigiTool to provide images and digital repository content
• Can provide covers, tables of content in conjunction with Syndetics
• Can provide links to Amazon.com from OPAC (important for reviews, etc.)
• Allows for personal tags and allows you to see the tags the community used!
• Lets you drill down with a column on the right hand side (like clutsy or aquabrowser)
• Suggests different results and recommends different searches.
• Washes dishes, Bakes cornbread–no, wait. That's my beautiful wife Michele.
• Offers alternative items that appear to be only partially relevant (Think Google offering books or maps at top.)
• My buddy Paul is firing questions left and right at them already. I'm just a notetaker.
• Quick results and more results separated
• Paul says "Hi, everyone. I am the world's foremost authority on IM."
• EL believes social computing is important to users.
  • Primo has a view most popular tags page.
• A few words about Primo
  • focused on end-user. User centered design.
  • social nature enriches experience of user
  • Can be used with any type of digital repository, deep-linking service. Not just EL's products
  • Exposes hidden collections
  • It is a "total solution"
    • integrated
    • scalable
    • something else
  • Uses four layers to accomplish all this.
• Q&A
  • would it replace OPAC?
    • new paradigm. shift from OPAC. OPAC part of ILS. Primo is "decoupling front end from the back end." OPAC front end for lib collections. Primo finds all collections of all types.
  • What is relationship between Primo and Metalib?
    • Primo discovers local and digital content. Gives library option of discovering remote resources. Metalib finds remote stuff. Primo displays it. Primo doesn't search it like ML does.
  • Do you offer Primo in non-English interfaces
    • Yes. Several languages. French, German, Korean, and it is can be translated.
  • What technology is used? How resembles NCSU OPAC.
    • goal to be comprehensive product for delivering scholarly content. Not just a search engine. Has powerful publishing platform.
  • Do catalog and metalib searches have to be in separate tabs
    • Takes more time to get metalib results than local
    • remote sources not normalized
  • Will it work with other systems than MetaLib
    • plan to make it work well with ML.
    • Doesn't say that it will work with others.
  • When will it be available
    • One partner in Europe and two in US are testing.
    • One partner in US will launch next week.
    • Several offering to participate at different levels (Man, I want to be one of these. I've been blogging this thing to death. Throw me a bone!)
    • Will be released in first quarter of next year (2007) for several institutions.

Sorry, folks, I did miss a couple of things, but that is the gist of it all. I hope I missed nothing important.

Well, enough fun. Off to a staff meeting.

Primo Webinar

For those who do not know, Ex Libris will be offering a webinar about Primo on May 9, 2006. I posted about Primo in an earlier post. You can register for the webinar here. I assume that the webinar is only for Ex Libris customers, but perhaps it is not. I am extremely excited to find out more about this product.

Kudos to Ex Libris

Kudos to the folks at Ex Libris for jumping into the library 2.0 discussion. Many librarians are currently complaining about the slowness of vendors to react to changes within computing culture. To be fair, the employees for some vendors are doing the same. For example, Stephen Abrams, SirsiDynix's VP for Innovation, bemoaned this slowness during his section of the Dead & Emerging Technologies Forum at CIL2006. It looks as if Ex Libris is working to at least stay close to the curve, if not ahead of it.

Patrons today probably expect that all library resources should be able to be found in one place. Federated searching and link resolvers are a nice start, but Ex Libris has gone one step further. Today, they officially published that they are developing a tool called Primo, "a complete solution for the discovery and delivery of diverse content types." I had a chance to speak with the folks at Ex Libris during the recent CIL2006, and I have to admit, they have my curiosity peaked. I like the fact that they are trying to bring all of a libraries resources into one place. I am extremely excited that they decided to make a fopac-like product that allows for tagging and comments. I cannot wait to see how this functions, and I think I would love to be in on the testing of this product.

I do have a few questions, though.

• Will Primo work in conjunction with other Ex Libris products such as MetaLib, or will it be a total replacement for it? I know the newsletter says, "Primo uses the metasearch capabilities of MetaLib to perform the searches on remote databases," but I am not exactly sure whether this means Primo has MetaLib built-in, or whether MetaLib will be separate. I think it means that one has to have MetaLib as a separate product, but I am not sure.
• Will institutions be able to add online resources to Primo? I assume they can. What if I want to use Primo to access several search engines? Can I do that?
• Will it generate RSS feeds and permalinks for searches?
• I know it is customizable, but can it be OpenSearch-like? Or can it be incorporated into OpenSearch?
• Given Paul Miller's recent article on the death of the OPAC, will Primo soon be unnecessary? FWIW, I highly doubt it, but I just thought I would throw it out there.

If anyone has any other questions, feel free to leave them in a comment. Perhaps someone from Ex Libris will come over and discuss all this. Whether they do or not, kudos to them for trying to give librarians what they say they want!