Are you happy with your Library Automation software?

Is Library Automation software meeting your needs?  It's a question that should be asked of all software, but of late we have been increasingly concerned about this issue. 

IWR is considering a major survey, we want to hear your success stories and your failures.  We also want to know just what the experience of acquiring this critical piece of information management software was like. Then we want to know what it was like to live with?

So, if we put a survey together, would you take the time respond?  Those interested could get the ball rolling by commenting to this blog posting. The more support we have for the idea, the more likely it is to happen.

Over to you.

Vendors offer free change of (search) engine

You would have to have had a long stretch in prison -– like a few former tech CEOs come to think of it -– to have missed the fact that search has emerged as a major software battleground over the last several years.

The vast majority of the buzz has been generated in the internet search consumer sector of course with early leaders such as Alta Vista (still going!) and Inktomi (later acquired by Yahoo) eventually being overhauled by the all-conquering Google. That story is engagingly told in John Battelle’s The Search, a book to be highly recommended for those still secretly puzzled about the inexorable rise of the G-men.

But the ability to search across the enterprise and value-chain partners is also becoming recognised as critical, hence the rise of free tools such as Google Desktop Search at the low end, and, further upscale, the release of the Google Search Appliance and Google Mini that have been quiet contributors to the firm’s sky-high revenues recently.

Slowly, some firms in the content management space are making their own moves.

Uncharacteristically perhaps, IBM has probably been the loudest and happiest to take risks. Its OmniFind Yahoo Edition is a free tool that can search and retrieve from a broad array of data sources and has a capacity of half a million documents. As the name suggests, it also uses a Yahoo front-end to make search a friendly, consumer-like experience rather than enforcing yet another arcane, proprietary front-end.

The early numbers suggest IBM is appealing to a broad constituency of firms and not just small ones. If you’re looking for the first time, or even for the nth time, at how you find those pesky files, it might be worth a try.

Microsoft is also at it, with plans to release a search appliance that promises a fast way to deploy its SharePoint Server, and of course, open-source products offer a risk-free way to trial services.

The surprise is that Open Text is rather quiet here, given how much it likes to remind us of its roots in search software.

Whether viewed as a software or hardware proposition, search is very hot and, for suppliers, a fast track into selling more wares further down the river. Look for more freebies, loss leaders and other tactics to lure you into changing the way you search.

Flippin' 'eck

Andrew McAfee, associate professor at Harvard Business School and the man who coined the Enterprise 2.0 term, has been advocating a 'flip test' for assessing the likely impact of new technologies.

He got the idea from Professor Stanley Crouch. Presumably the same Stanley Crouch that writes columns for nydailynews.com and is occasionally controversial and is somewhat into jazz.

McAfee offers an example taken from a conference he was involved in. One of his fellow panellists said, "Let's say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called 'paper.'  It's cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries.  You can't write over it once it's been written on, but you buy more very cheaply.  Wouldn't that technology come to dominate the market?"

It's an interesting approach isn't it? Can the flip test be applied whenever assessing any new technology? Hey, never mind these OPACs, how about index cards? All you have to do is come into the library - lots of socialisation (as long as it's done quietly). Access to loads of books but, often, the one you want isn't there...

Now apply it to blogging, news readers, wikis, Twitters, Facebook and so on. If a later one in that list existed, would an earlier one have made a mark?

Facebook is a strange hybrid. It largely ignores some existing technologies like RSS, yet it seems to be gaining popularity. (Like hundreds of thousands of new users per day.) It offers public places to hang out with like-minded individuals, while providing private spaces and the ability to exchange private messages as well. A kind of one-stop shop for most social things we do online.

It also offers a way to spill large chunks of your identity onto the web or into the possession of the organisation which run this essentially private domain.

Peer pressure is intense. I steadfastly refuse to 'be friends' with people I don't actually know (or like), despite the guilt that goes with hurting their feelings. Of course, I'm probably not hurting them at all, because they are just handing over their entire address books to the service and giving it permission to send out these obligation-laden 'be my friend' emails.

Perhaps we all need to take stock of where these new technologies are leading us. And the 'flip test' offered by professors Crouch and McAfee strikes me as one darned useful tool for our armouries.

Hat tip to Paul Miller for sparking off this train of thought.

Keeping secrets

One of the most entertaining things about the recent launch of Apple's iPhone has been watching what the hackers have been making of it. My personal favourite so far has involved a jeweller's loupe, used to turn the iPhone's camera into a rudimentary microscope.

There's no doubt the iPhone is selling like hot cakes, but the least attractive thing about it, as with the purchase of the most shiny and expensive new mobiles, is the contract. The handset might be free (or in the case of more fancy phones, hundreds of pounds) but the call plan you have to buy with the phone will recoup the price of the handset and more.

Quite naturally, people want to be able to use the other bits of the iPhone without paying the phone company - in the case of the US, Cingular. Apple and Cingular/AT&T have locked the iPhone to the network - you can't go t a different provider and sign up to their network. This is something the US Copyright Office and regulators over on this side of the pond think is a bad thing. Even better, it's not illegal to unlock phones.

Flood risk information could be revealed by Environment Agency, reveals Guardian

Daily newspaper The Guardian is still pursuing its worthy campaign Free our Data, which highlights how much information the government creates and then either never makes available to information professionals and consumers or does so at restrictively high prices.

Today's issue of the newspaper rather timely reveals how the Environment Agency forced an online information provider to remove flood information from its service which the company had gained from the Environment Agency. It did this as large parts of Yorkshire look more like Bangladesh as climate change wrought terrible rain and flooding on the region.

OnOneMap.com uses Google maps to offer a mash-up service that over lays information onto the maps such as properties for sale and let, the location of schools, supermarkets and mobile phones. To improve its service further, OnOneMap carried out a data scrape of the Environment Agency and collated together a layer of flood information, which, with no surprise created massive interest.

Just days before the heavens opened and flooded large parts of the UK, the Environment Agency demanded that the data be removed because of an infringement of "database copyright".

Guardian journalist Charles Arthur describes the need for this service and its use public information as an opportunity to save public money as there is a reduced need to use emergency services if houses in high flood risk areas are, effectively abandoned, especially when this information has been left out of the new Home Information Packs.

It’s a compelling story and The Guardian should be saluted for continuing this campaign, read the full story here:

British Library Toolkit means any library can join the digitising party

The British Library announced yesterday they will be making the license available for their Turning The Pages software toolkit. The 3D software has been redeveloped by Armadillo Systems and has already allowed Britain’s national library to publish fully interactive copies online of famous treasures such as Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks and Mercator’s Atlas of Europe.

This means that like the BL’s offering other libraries can now show their virtual books at different angles, allow users to zoom and rotate copies and even compare works. The Armadillo Systems tool-kit will allow users to add their high-resolution digital copies of works and post them online as virtual 3d reproductions. To fully utilise the toolkit, Windows Vista is a must. Adding audio commentary, annotations and even determining the kind of paper and how the page turns are options. As far as Web 2.0 widgets go, viewers can also comment on the source material.

The good news for libraries and archives that want a piece of the action but don’t have the budget is that there will be a competition run by the BL and Armadillo to offer toolkits to a set of winners. What’s more, their freshly digitised content will be accessible on the British Libraries site for 3 years giving libraries that are less established the chance to digitise their most precious books not to mention some decent exposure for the institute concerned.

Clive Izard, Head of Creative Services at the British Library has this to say; “Turning The Pages toolkit has allowed us to create high-quality digital replicas of some of the most valuable books in the World and make them available to anyone with access to the Internet. With the launch of Turning The Pages 2.0, other libraries, archives and museums can now use our software to do the same”

The enhancement to the software follows Microsoft’s initial launch of new operating system Vista, in which they fully digitised Bill Gates’ copy of Da Vinci’s codex notebook. It accompanied the BL’s to highlight how the software can be utilised to create highly interactive digital copies of printed works.   

Alfresco offers way out of ECM M&A gridlock

I suppose that if you asked anybody
following the space to provide one word to describe enterprise content
management in recent times, ‘consolidation’ and ‘rationalisation’
wouldn’t be to far off the top suggestions, closely followed by our old friends
across the software business, ‘mergers’ and ‘acquisitions’.

The conventional wisdom is that these deals
have the effect of deadening the market and creating a situation where the rich
keep on getting richer and the poor get poorer. Unable to compete against huge
budgets, startups cannot win share and wither on the proverbial -- or so the theory goes. It’s certainly
true that with the current near-frozen IPO market, it’s very tough for smaller
players to go head to head with the established players.

The old advice of ‘get big, get niche or get
out’ still has relevance and, of course, several former ECM giants such as
FileNet, Documentum and Stellent have combined the first and last of these,
opting to get big and get out of the market as independents to become scions of
the industry giants.

Others are defending niches but some,
praise the Lord, have far bigger aspirations. The old advice was written before
open-source software development was considered as a serious platform for a
business model and it’s only open-source that can prevent the ECM sector becoming a
plaything of acquisition-crazed behemoths.

Perhaps the most interesting of these new
competitors is a company I met up with for the first time recently, Alfresco. A true
open-source company that uses the GPL licence, Alfresco has plenty of
credentials to suggest it could stick around to make things interesting.

Its management and development team is a
dream ticket. The CEO is John Powell, who formerly worked at proprietary software firms including
Oracle, and Business Objects, where he rose to become COO. The CTO is John
Newton, who co-founded Documentum. The engineering team is based on former
coders from Documentum and Interwoven, providing a balance of documentum
management and web content management skills. And Alfresco even has a mix
of geographical know-how as Powell is a Brit and Newton, an American, has spent
plenty of time over on this side of the pond.

Powell’s contention is an interesting one.
He suggests that while combinations such as EMC-Documentum have created wealth
and marketing power, the stream of deal-making to add in other capabilities has
resulted in more time being spent on integration than core R&D. By starting
with a blank screen, corralling the goodwill of veteran developers and taking
advantage of the latest tools, he suggests that Alfresco can challenge the big
guys by the old trick of building a better mousetrap.

There are plenty of people in thrall to the
behemoths and citing risk aversion as an excuse for pricey, underperforming
projects, but Linux arrived in enterprises through the back door, filling
niches as it went along, despite those firms being nominally Windows shops. As new projects kick off, there’s no reason why
Alfresco can’t plough a similar furrow and become a significant challenge to the status quo.