Welcome to the Talis Library Platform News

Another holiday season passed, another year begun, another issue of the Library Platform News. What are the prospects for 2008, will it be another year of rapid innovation in technology and attitudes like the previous few have been? I predict that if anything the pace is going to increase even more.

In this month's issue, I get out my crystal ball and look and to see if 2008 will be the year of Semantic Library, as well as reporting on the results of co-operation between Talis and LibraryThing - a great start to what should be an exciting year.

If you are new to the newsletter sign up, pass it on and tell your colleagues about it and join us in creating a community that shares, innovates and learns from each other. If you would like to contribute an article or offer comments please email richard.wallis@talis.com.

Richard Wallis, Editor

LibraryThing and Talis Partnership

The first fruit of a partnership between LibraryThing, the social online personal cataloguing site with in excess of 300 thousand members, and Talis, means that LibraryThing members can now use The British Library and the Talis Union to identify books in their personal collections, adding to the over 22 million already catalogued.

The Talis Union has been built over many years by professional cataloguers in libraries all over the UK and Ireland. This data set is a treasure trove of rare, old and out-of-print items as well as quality catalogue records for mainstream items.

Both of these data sources have previously only been available, in this form, to libraries that subscribe to the Talis Base bibliographic database service.

The addition of these sources will not only be of great benefit to LibraryThing members in the UK, but also to those with UK-originated books across the world.

Through this partnership Talis is also gaining access to LibraryThing data, such as book jacket images and user ratings data, which will be used in the Talis Platform.

As Tim Spalding, LibraryThing founder, said in his blog post “This marks the first thing we've done with them, but we've been wanting to work with them for ages. They have been tireless proponents of Library 2.0 innovations and of open data. We are avid listeners to their podcast, Talking with Talis, and have even been on a few times (my favourite was the open data discussion).”

This partnership is hopefully the first of many that will see the opening up of data for the benefit of all.

Podcast of the Month

Microsoft Evangelist interviews Richard Wallis

Jon Udell, Internet Commentator and Evangelist at Microsoft, turns the tables on Richard Wallis, interviewing him about Talis and the Talis Platform for his IT Conversations Interviews with Innovators series. This was the second of a pair of conversations. In the first Richard interviewed Jon about his interest in the world of libraries and the LibraryLookup project.

Will 2008 be the year of Semantic Library?

Richard Wallis

2006 was the year of Library 2.0 with the seminal paper Do Libraries Matter - The rise of Library 2.0 being published late in the preceding year. A year when it seemed that you couldn’t have a conversation with a librarian without using the words Blog, Wiki, or Folksonomy.

This wave of interest, activity and enthusiasm spilled over into 2007 which also could be considered as a year of Library 2.0. As 2007 rolled on, other things started to enter the minds and vocabularies of those thinking about the way libraries and their systems are developing. RDF, RDA, Web 3.0, Semantic Web, Open Data - all words that would have been off radar for many, are now appearing in more and more presentations and articles.

It is still early days, in the library world, for many of these terms and the concepts behind them but that is where we were in late 2005 for Library 2.0 terms and concepts. So what difference will talking about Semantic Library make? It will mean that we will start to talk about the ways we can join together the islands of new and traditional data that we are collecting.

One aspect of the Library 2.0 debate has been about opening up the library catalogue, making it easier to use and more accessible both for users, and systems via APIs. Another aspect has been using activity information to provide services such as who-borrowed-this-borrowed-that and most popular books etc. Yet another trend is for ‘social networking’ features such as tagging and reader reviews. Like baubles on the recently packed away Christmas tree these features add to the overall look of the online library, but they make little or no difference to its core functionality.

Imagine the activities of other users being used to help return results relevant to a searching user; or that the subject of study of a University student could have a similar effect. This is all possible utilising Semantic Web technologies, linking together concepts within the data that we are collecting. For instance if students are identified as being on a certain course, with set reading lists, this could influence the relevance ranking of their search results. There are many possibilities, once you start thinking down these lines, and opening up your minds to work beyond the simple use of bibliographic data.

Like the beginnings of all such debates it is easy to miss some of the problems that might occur on the way. Things like privacy legislators, with too little knowledge, not seeing the difference between user data and usage data. Nevertheless 2008 looks like the year we are going to be talking about such possibilities.

Worth Watching

Talis Insight Conference

Last month we drew your attention to the large number of session videos recorded at the Talis Insight Conference in November. We make no excuse for doing it again this month. These videos are a treasure trove, for those interested in library issues and technology.

They are linked from the Conference Programme. Key presentations such as Richard Wallis presenting on the Semantic Web and Libraries, Richard Cameron, of CiteULike, discussing how journal articles are catalogued, Marshall Breeding on the state of the ILS market, are just a few that we can recommend.

Meet the Team

Elliot Smith, Software Engineer/Developer

This month we meet Elliot Smith, Software Engineer/Developer at Talis. With a doctorate in Computer Science and once a Web Developer at the University at Birmingham, Elliot has also worked with Open Advantage, a government supported initiative, that encourages local businesses to use and produce open source software.

"I was aware of Talis' involvement in the Semantic Web, and the interesting projects the company is running. This was very appealing to me. Working on these projects first hand is very exciting, particularly where they involve open source."

Elliot has already been involved in a number of projects in his first four months at Talis, including building web services, writing open source library system APIs, and working on a library tuned layer of technology that interacts with the Talis Platform. "Working on a wide range of projects within a wide range of teams is great. It's helped me get a much better grasp of project development and I've learned a lot of new skills already.

"The culture, vibe and orientation at Talis is radically different from anywhere I've worked before. Previously, my work style was quite solitary. However at Talis, development is a much more sociable activity. I get to engage with lots of different people with varied perspectives and aptitudes.

"I'm enjoying it very much!"

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