Bodleian Repository Plans scuppered

Not great news this week for the Bodleian Library which has had its plans to build a new book depository rejected.

Back in September I originally blogged on how the eminent, ancient and utterly congested library got the thumbs up to build a new state of the art site near the city centre. It is intended to house 8 million books and will relive pressure on the library currently operating at 130% capacity and adding an additional 5,000 books per week.

The reasons for rejection from the local council were based on concerns of how the new repository would affect the city’s attractive skyline, the second that the site was on a flood plain.

Dr Sarah Thomas, Bodleian chief said “We worked with the Environment Agency, English Heritage and the city, and ultimately a solution will present itself”.  Local paper the Oxford Mail also reported that Thomas said it was too early to consider an appeal or alternative locations for the new building.

One thing that is not going to go away is the urgent need for a safe, secure, space. How long will it take until the library’s seams start to burst?

Facebook: the new go-to platform for ECM?

There's a famous Bob Dylan press conference of the 1960s where a hapless journalist asks the young singer to define his music "for people like me who are well over 40". Dylan, for it is he, answers that it can defined as music "for people who are well under 40". As a member of the fifth-decade club myself, I can empathise with the old hack -- my ancient critical faculties don't stretch to understanding the Facebook phenomenon.

What I can understand is that Facebook and other popular social networks have tremendous reach, and, therefore, offer tremendous opportunities and, by logical extension, carry an equal degree of risk. Enter Alfresco and its announcement that it is integrating with Facebook. I'm not too sure that this wasn't in part a clever PR stunt that exploits the fascination with the website du jour but it makes complete sense for ECM firms to be applying their management tools to content that is exposed on sites like Facebook.

As even the most conservative companies recognise that exposing content to blogs, wikis, podcasts social networks and other formats will be a necessary part of their futures, that content will need to be managed. The ECM system should become the preferred alternative to piecemeal alternatives to managing content and companies that neglect to protect that content will be in trouble.

Having said that, I'm not convinced that Forrester's Kyle McNabb is right to suggest that this is the end of ECM as we know it. Large companies will be among the last to adopt the latest social media, but that is no excuse for ECM firms not to build in necessary controls ahead of demand.

Cut the spin, save the world

I wonder if our lords and masters (our servants really, although that's difficult to believe) ever consider the environmental consequences of their decisions? Take the national identity card. Will the storage drives need to rotate perpetually in case anyone decides to check us out? Or could the forces of law and order be happy to wait while a drive is fired up and rummaged? If the drives are running continuously, has anyone worked out how much energy would be needed to run them, the computers that access them and the systems needed to cool them?

My guess is that the people who conceive these surveillance projects do not bother themselves with such matters. Yet, even if we're not yet running out of energy, it gets more expensive by the day and, of course, most of it contributes to the carbonisation of the planet. Surely any politician worth their salt would be careful before burdening the atmosphere with more CO2?

Which brings me to the British Library and its Microsoft-sponsored digitisation project. It's been worrying the hell out of me. I've been thinking of all those computers and disk drives sustaining substantial quantities of material that's going to be looked at only rarely. It makes no sense. But then offline tape storage doesn't make sense either.

Fortunately, a company called Nexsan has provided the Library with an answer. It's invented a MAID, a Massive Array of Idle Disks. They sit around quietly stationary until they're woken up by a request for information. This approach, according to Nexsan, cuts energy use by 96 percent. It gives an example of a conventional fibre channel storage device which consumes 187KW of energy per petabyte, whether it's being accessed or not. Its own Nexsan Assureon system in Level 3 AutoMAID idle mode consumes just 6KW.

It makes you think, doesn't it? Especially if your organisation has massive amounts of 'Just in case' storage.

Information professionals guiding you to the best bits of the blogosphere - Lorcan Dempsey

Lorcan Dempsey has worked for JISC and libraries on both sides of the Irish Sea and the Atlantic. As a member of the National Information Standards Organisation, his blog on networked information and digital libraries is well followed.

Q Who are you?
A I work in Dublin, Ohio, was born in Dublin, Ireland, and spent a long time in between in the UK. I am lucky to have what I believe to be one of the most interesting jobs in the library world. I am responsible for the programmes and research area within OCLC (Online Computer Library Center). I also help shape OCLC strategic direction.

Q Where can we find your blog?
A http://orweblog.oclc.org

Q Describe your blog?
A I say that it is about “libraries, networks and services”. I suppose that over time it has become more general. At first it had more of a technical slant; now it ranges more widely. I tend to talk about how networks are reconfiguring library services and I have some recurrent threads. These include:

Making data work harder.
We invest a lot in bibliographic data and need to use it more imaginatively in our systems and services.
Moving to the network level.
No single website is the sole focus of a user’s attention. The network is the focus of attention. And a major part of our network use revolves around significant network-level services ­ Amazon, Google, IMDB, and so on. These match supply and demand in efficient ways. The real message of Web 2.0 is the emergence of this pattern of service: data hubs with strong gravitational pull generated through network effects.
Being in the flow.
The focus of attention has shifted from website to workflow. The network is not so much about finding things as getting things done, and we have increasingly rich support for “networkflow”. We may construct our personal digital identities around services in the browser or on the network (RSS aggregators, social networking sites, bookmarks, etc), and we use prefabricated workflows (course management system, customer relationship management system, and so on).

Q How long have you been blogging?
A Almost four years.

Q What started you blogging?
A After I arrived in OCLC I tended to send out a lot of emails. A colleague suggested that a blog might be a better model.

Q Do you comment on other blogs and what is the value of it?
A The comments on some blogs seem more important than on others.

Q What are the blogs in your sector that you trust?
A I keep a wide range of feeds in my aggregator and will focus on different ones from time to time. Again, I tend to be more interested in “voice” or those from whom I can learn something. From a library point of view, I look at Caveat Lector (http://cavlec.yarinareth.net) and ACRLog (www.acrlblog.org).

Alma Swan’s new blog, OptimalScholarship (http://optimalscholarship.blogspot.com) and eFoundations (http://efoundations.typepad.com) from Andy Powell and Pete Johnston, are informative and provocative. I find PlanetCode4Lib (http://planet.code4lib.org) an efficient and useful way of keeping up with a range of stuff.

Q What good things have happened to you that could only have happened because of your blogging?
A I have always contributed to the professional literature. But I find that blogging is quite liberating: it is much easier to write blog entries than longer pieces. It has made me write more quickly and to think about short communications.

Q Which blogs do you read just for fun?
A I look at John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 (http://memex.naughtons.org) and William Gibson’s blog (www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp), and the pictures in YarnStorm (http://yarnstorm.blogs.com) make me smile.

BL backed with Gov bucks

It has been a pretty good week for the British Library (BL) having just won a renewed level of funding from the Department for Culture Media and Sport. The BL will receive a rise of 2.7% keeping it in line with inflation. There were fears originally that the Government’s Public Sector Spending Review may entail a reduction of funds to the library. Cuts would have seriously affected the level of service and provision the library would be able to offer. It’s good to hear that access to the reading rooms remains free, along with a variety of other services.

I imagine there has been a collective sigh of relief over at the nation’s world class library, not least from BL Chief Executive Lynne Brindley. The library’s CEO has previously said cuts would mean she would end up running “a second rate organisation”. Yet there is still the issue of ensuring the BL’s annual capital settlement remains adequate to continue with the BL’s massive national newspaper digitisation project.

Brindley also appears in an interview in this month’s Harvard Business Review. The esteemed title asks what lessons she has learnt during her tenure at the library so far, “I learned the importance of fitting communications to what the organisation wants and needs – otherwise you don’t get the buy-in” she says.

So far it’s a good thing she got the purse-string holders to buy-into her vision, let’s see if Brindley and the library’s supporters can get the continued funding they need.

EMC's lateral thinking pays off

The rise of enterprise content management over the last five years has seen the entry of giants into a segment once characterised by names only a specialist would have recognised.

Microsoft has made its play with an in-house approach that has delivered the hugely successful SharePoint. IBM has also done a lot of work behind the scenes with content management services, but admitted the need for more when it announced the acquisition of FileNet in 2006. Similarly, Oracle got a fair way down the line, tying in services with its database, but then acquired Stellent last year for its customers and deeper domain knowledge.

These were decent strategies that were characteristic of the seasoned companies that delivered them but perhaps the least convincing strategy came from EMC. The company had made its name as the Switzerland of storage, being an independent company that was not tied to servers in the way rivals IBM, HP and Sun were. EMC was pretty much a pure hardware company until it acquired Documentum in 2003, although it had signalled its intent by agreeing to buy storage software giant Legato Systems just months earlier.

EMC justified itself by saying storage needed intelligent software if companies were to automate the protection of files. Then, in a move that again puzzled many onlookers, EMC acquired VMware and said storage and server virtualisation needed to converge. Plenty of people scratched chins and wondered if EMC was imagining synergies that were invisible to the rest of us.

Today, with unstructured data continuing to grow at a bewildering speed, with compliance mandates showing no sign of letting up, with ECM and storage infrastructure walking in lockstep, and with VMware shaping up as the biggest hypergrowth company in technology since Google, nobody is criticising EMC’s strategy. Proof, if ever it were needed, that lateral thinking can work wonders.

Problems and Solutions? IRFS Day 2

After a storming start to yesterday’s Information Retrieval Facility Symposium (IRFS), enthusiasm was still running high this morning. The opening keynote for day two was hosted by Henk Tomas from IP Search Services; he did a great job outlining pretty much all the main issues facing information specialist and patent workers. His fellow speakers were hard-pressed not to duplicate what he had already covered. It is also a nice opportunity to give you an overview of the main challenges raised at the symposium.

Up for consideration was a thorough examination of why patent information is so important to both small and big business alike. Tomas explained that patent information can be used a means of keeping tabs on competitors, suppliers and emerging technological developments. It is also a way of hobbling others from utilising a technology to prevent advantage and can avoid a duplication of efforts or ‘reinventing the wheel’; furthermore, patents are part of a globally accepted legal system.

Tomas identified many of the big issues to address and conquer. My top three of those he mentioned are issues I have seen raised here more once.

• A massive rise in patent and non-patent literature in the last 30 years. Much of this is Asian in origin; the language differences and therefore difficulties are obvious. There is also a risk of drowning in information.

• A lack of standards in the patent world, particularly in terms of the point of information entry. A common database structure would also help for search purposes.

• Errors and inconsistencies in content sometimes made deliberately for competitive advantage.

Follow-up speaker was Minoo Philipp; she is the Patent Information Manager at chemical manufacturer Henkel and President of the Patent Documentation Group. She asked the audience, “Do we have a problem with patent searching? No, it’s finding the right information.’ ‘The problem is the structure available and also the errors” she added.

Philipp called for a global standardisation of how patent applications are made. It wasn’t something all the delegates agreed with, believing a technical solution was required instead. Philipp asked ‘wasn’t that treating the symptom rather than the disease?’

Considering the implications for standardisation could necessitate a change of each nation’s patent laws, that one solution may be a while coming.