Welcome to the first issue of Talis Library Platform News

At Talis we believe that libraries, software providers, suppliers and developers will achieve far more by working together. In fact, only by creating an open environment, open applications and open business models that allow libraries to share effort, collaborate and share innovation across the whole library community, can we ensure libraries continue their crucial role over the next 20 years in an ever more demanding world.

The Talis Library Platform, and the network that is forming around it, will help libraries and library staff to share, collaborate and learn from each other so we can work together to solve the challenges faced by libraries in delivering the next generation of services to their customers. A library should be able to share as much or as little as they like, with whom they like. Core to the concept of sharing across the community is the concept of the library commons, open data and open software. Simply put, the library commons is a means to allow the efforts of one library to benefit all libraries, forever. The effort, be that software, data or content, becomes a public good.

One of the ways we are fostering this community spirit is through the Talis Developer Network (TDN), a unique network that invites you to view, extend and build applications on the underlying Platform. The Talis Library Platform is built on the principles of openness and shared innovation, underpinned by technology and licenses to enable all to build flexible, engaging and open systems that realise the full potential of data shared with the Platform, regardless of their library system.

Through this monthly newsletter we hope to further encourage you to join us in building a community that will be a touch point for innovation and provoke discussion in the world of libraries and the technology they use.

This first issue of Talis Library Platform News will give you a taste of what you can expect every month. Regular features will include ‘Meet the Developer’ with this month Ross Singer of Georgia Institute of Technology discussing his experiences of using the Talis Platform, ‘Meet the Team’, a profile of one of the Talis team working on the Talis Platform. It will also include simple examples of how it can improve the experience of library users; code examples for the technical, and case studies for those that would prefer to leave it to their technical colleagues.

Sign up, pass it on and tell your colleagues about the newsletter and join us in creating a community that shares, innovates and learns from each other.

Justin Leavesley

Chief Strategy Officer and Director, Talis

Who Needs Developers?

Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist, Talis

Only some of us! - Without developers, leading edge services would never emerge, evolve, and move in to the mainstream for us all to benefit from. In the same way our community needs those with an in-depth understanding of metadata standards, such as Diane Hillmann (see below), but we do not all need to be cataloguers to derive benefits from their efforts for our user communities.

Core to this evolution is technology - The Talis Platform is a technology platform - but you don't need to be a technology geek to take advantage of it. Anyone can try the innovative library linked search experience of Cenote without being a technology geek. Any library can contribute their holdings to the Platform and join one or many unions or communities, using simple well established techniques.

It is about sharing; the sharing of ideas and experience as much as it is about enabling the sharing of data, either globally or in often overlapping community groups; the sharing of applications and functionality built on a Platform; the sharing of the core functionality to drive many of the services we all provide.

In this first issue of the Talis Library Platform News, you will see the term 'developer' used many times - not unexpected as it is those developers who are at the forefront of demonstrating what is possible, from which we can all benefit as their efforts spread through our community.

Podcast of the Month - Diane Hillmann of Cornell University

In a recent Talking with Talis podcast, Richard Wallis talks with Diane Hillmann of Cornell University.

Diane has been associated with library metadata standards, such as Dublin Core and RDA for many years. They discuss these and other standards and the recent meeting, held at the British Library which recommended the bringing together of work on RDA and DCMI. They also go on to discuss the work of the National Science Digital Library Metadata Registry, RDF and how the Semantic Web will influence library metadata and the way it is produced and shared.

There is much debate in the cataloguing world about the suitability of Marc, and what if anything should replace it. This podcast provides a good insight in to the issues and the associated developments around standards creation

What is the Talis Platform?

Ian Davis, Chief Technology Officer and Director, Talis

The Talis Platform is a new technology environment for building human-centric, information-rich applications. It is provided as Software as a Service (SaaS) and is designed to hide the complexity of storing, analysing and managing large amounts of semi-structured data. Applications can use the Platform API, a series of RESTful web services, to create, update and search all kinds of data managed by the Platform.

The Platform provides a generic capability to manage and organise content and its metadata. Any type of content such as images, documents or files can be added to the Platform. Each piece of content is automatically assigned a URI and so is made addressable and linkable in the Web. This allows references to the data, i.e. more metadata, to be made by anyone, whether managed by the Platform or not.

Content is organised into regions called stores which can be separately configured and controlled. The Platform encourages sharing and remixing of content so stores may be combined in many different ways for searching. Additionally stores can augment the content in other stores. This augmentation relates content managed by one store with content in others by analysing each store's metadata and determining the best way to combine them. For example, in the case of a store containing book information, other stores containing images of book jackets, author biographies, reviews or tags can be used to augment items discovered by searching for books. The result is a very simple mechanism for building applications that combine data from many sources.

The Platform supports a rich set of services for accessing and remixing data and automatic faceting. The default query interface provides full-text searching over indexed content and metadata supporting a rich search syntax and sorting by platform-determined relevance factors or by specified metadata fields. The Platform aggregates, anonymises and analyses patterns of usage of the content managed by the Platform to calculate its relevance factors. These patterns of usage will also be available as individual services so that applications can incorporate suggestions and improved relevancy of information to their users.

The Talis Platform is designed to facilitate sophisticated mass collaboration. Multiple applications supporting many thousands of users can share content such as union catalogues, reader reviews, either by agreeing on a standardised schema and using a single store, or by using independent formats in distinct stores relying on the Platform's capabilities for relating different schemas together.

Semantic Web technologies such as RDF are at the core of the technology used to create the Platform. In addition to the simple interfaces for all to use, the Platform also provides a Sparql, the RDF query language, for those that wish to interact with the stored metadata at that level.

The Talis Platform, as described here has massive generic capability for providing solutions accross many problem domains. The Talis Library Platform is a specialisation of the Platform with capabilities specifically suited to the world of Libraries - Including metadata stores natively aware of Marc, Dublin Core and ISO2709, augmentation capabilities based upon ISBN, author names etc.

Those interested in exploring ways of leveraging the Library Platform's capabilities within their own organisations or applications should contact richard.wallis@talis.com.

TDN - The Talis Developer Network

The Talis Developer Network (TDN) is shared space, around which a community of interested parties is growing. There are no complex membership requirements, and no need to have a particular library system from a single vendor. All you need is knowledge, experience, data or services that you wish to share or talk about or, conversely, knowledge, experience, data or services that you wish to use or learn about. Or you may even just wish to lurk until one or other of those is true.

You will find forums, documentation, and examples of working with the Talis Library Platform and Library Systems from many vendors. All supplemented with downloads of useful tools, videocasts and much more. Take a look at the TDN here.

Featured Developer

Ross Singer, application developer at Georgia Tech Library

I have been trying to get buy-in for a while now at work to create services that are based on the actual collections available to our users; beyond just our own holdings, but everything that is available to a specific person. One specific type of service I was trying to lay out for my colleagues was the notion of ad-hoc union catalogs. For example, we have a joint degree program with Emory University. While it doesn’t make sense to search both institutions catalogs by default, it would seem a logical service for the faculty and students that are actually in that program. Also, the Atlanta area schools have a universal borrowing agreement: theoretically any student in Atlanta can go into any other school (and with a bit of paperwork) and check out a book. There is no way to search these schools’ catalogs simultaneously, however. If the user is willing to trek across town for the perfect resource for their research, they have to check each individual school’s OPAC to do so.

The wrinkle with services like this is that they are only going to be useful to a very limited audience. That in itself doesn’t mean that they are not worth pursuing, but it definitely means that they need to be quick and easy to implement. That is why I was interested in exploring the Talis Platform as a means to deliver this. No need to worry about storage, indexing, data cleanup or providing some kind of machine access; just have the libraries set up a process to export their holdings to Talis (like any other Talis Source library would do) and then their collections are available in the Platform. Much easier than recreating all of that locally.

Ian Davis contacted me about pursuing this, so I made a bulk record export I had lying about on my development machine available for him to upload into the Platform. A short while later I got instructions on how to access my store and a URL for the Platform API documentation.

I really knew nothing about Platform and I’ve never been much of a documentation reader (they’re always so boring!), so I set out learning the Platform by writing a Ruby library to access it.

In my cursory glance-over of the API docs, I decided that there were four main activities that the Platform provided: Searching, Faceting, Retrieving item records and Augment searches with results from other stores. At the time of writing the library, I didn’t really “get” the Augment service (it makes more sense to me now), so I focused on the first three. Through the “Search” class you can get back a result set, which can include term facets or even pull back the search for the full records embedded (Platform by default returns RDF/DC).

So with one real day of work, I managed to create a reusable component to access any store in the Platform which made creating union catalogs as easy as querying, merging and displaying (basically another day’s work or so). I could never have done this in a sustainable way in a reasonable time period on my own. And to add the functionality that the Augment service gives would make this project completely unfeasible.

I haven’t talked any of the other local libraries to participate, yet, but when I show them how quickly we can get these sorts of dynamic services running, it will be a bit of a no-brainer for them.

Building a Union - A Coffee Time Excersise?

Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist, Talis

We are often asked “so what is the benefit of this Platform thing then?” The questioner usually goes on to explain that they are not a technical person, their technical colleagues are telling them that The Talis Platform is cool, but can we describe it in a way that is meaningful to them.

Building a union catalogue between two or more libraries is a good example. Having your data loaded in to the Talis Platform, like many libraries have already done, means that a union view of your holdings aggregated with any other library’s holdings loaded in the Platform, can be created with just some simple configuration. A library can be a member of any number of union views. So for instance a University could appear as part of a geographical union with their local public library, and a member of a union of subject related universities. The multiple aggregations being based one image of their data.

Providing a user interface for searching and displaying the holdings of a union catalogue is also quick and simple – you do have to get your technical friend involved here, but not for very long. Rob Styles in the video “The Twenty Minute Union Catalogue” demonstrates how a simple user interface, to data aggregated in the Platform, can be created in a handful of minutes.

From this example you can see that an initial version of a union catalogue can be constructed in less time than it would traditionally take to discuss if a union might be a good idea. A total rethink about the possibilities enabled by the data libraries hold.

Worth Watching - OCLC's Eric Hellman

Eric Hellman, Director of OCLC's Openly Informatics Division, paid a visit to the Talis offices recently. We took the opportunity to record a videocast with him.

Eric, in conversation with Richard Wallis, talked about the way Openly Informatics fits in with the other OCLC divisions, and the services they brought with them when they joined some eighteen months ago.

Eric also describes the xISBN service, which the Openly Division is responsible for operating, and how it may be used by libraries and other organisations to add value to book listings and search results. The videocast was published in the Panlibus Blog - here.

xISBN is a great example of an emerging trend; valuable functionality derived from a community (in this case the OCLC membership) easily available for all to use to improve the service to their users. xISBN is free to use for low volume non-commercial users. This trend is also reflected by LibraryThing, with their LibraryThing for Libraries service, which enables libraries to benefit from the shared value aggregated in their world wide community of users to provide book recommendations, reviews, ratings, etc. as part of the library OPAC.

Meet the API

This will be a regular feature, where we will take an individual element of the services provided by the Talis Platform and explain what it does and how it can be used.

As a start, an overview of the storage component of the Platform [code named Bigfoot] is probably in order. To quote the documentation in the TDN a store is “a zero-setup, multi-tenant content and metadata storage facility capable of storing and querying across very large datasets” Lets pick that description apart.

Zero-setup – A store can be created by a simple call to a Platform service basically providing a name for it and an indication of the type of data being stored. In the not too distant future, this will be possible via a simple user interface to control your stores.

Multi-tenant – A store can be used to hold data for many instances of the same application controlling the visibility of that data to allow sharing, or not, between the users of those instances.

Content and Metadata – When data is loaded in to a store it is held in its original form (bibliographic record, image, review, etc.). The extraction and storage of metadata, for indexing etc., is a separate process enabling the creation of rich metadata whilst preserving the original form.

Storing and querying across very large datasets – The Bigfoot architecture, from its inception, has been designed to store and rapidly index and retrieve data on a Web Scale.

Each store provides standard APIs for updating, searching, augmenting, facet browsing, harvesting, and controlling, by default. In future issues we will explore these individual APIs in more detail. If you want to get ahead of the game and have a play check out the Platform documentation in the TDN.

Meet the Team

Nadeem Shabir (Nad to those who know him) has just celebrated his first years anniversary at Talis. We take some time out to talk to Nad and find out what he has been doing and what he really thinks about working at Talis.

Since joining Talis last year as a software development engineer, Nad has worked with the Talis Platform team, building applications that showcase the power of the Platform and what can be done with it. One such application is Project Cenote that shows what a library search site could look like and was built by Nad and Rob Styles in just 3 days. Nad explains “The original version of Cenote was a read only application that allowed users to search for books and then mash up the results with data held in various stores in the Talis Platform , as well as external sources such as Amazon, to provide users with some pretty useful information. More recently I have worked on a spike to extend the original version to allow users to use that data to create and share some really useful things. What’s really impressed me was the speed with which we were able to put it all together. The spike was timeboxed to two weeks, but the reality is that the bulk of the implementation was completed in a few days. I think there are some important reasons why we were able to put it together so quickly. The technology stack has been kept very simple – it’s just an application built in PHP5 , running under Apache 2.

Furthermore, the application is built upon the Talis Platform which is constantly evolving and becoming more and more powerful.I’m not saying that just as someone who has worked on building that platform, I’m actually saying that as someone who has been using and consuming its services primarily to build applications with it. When Rob and I originally wrote Cenote, we were both impressed at how easily we were able to use the platform, as it was then, to put together a cool looking application in the space of a couple of days. If that impressed me at the time, then I’m doubly impressed at how simple it’s been to create an application that supports creation, deletion and updating of data. We have released the Project Cenote code as open source on our Talis Developer Network (TDN) so that libraries can experiment with ideas and code themselves. Take a look and you will see how straightforward it is to modify to your own requirements.

More recently Nad has been working on Talis Engage our new community information product. Talis Engage is the first application built on the Talis Platform, centrally hosted and delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Nad explains “I’ve learnt more this last twelve months than in the five years I spent at my previous job. I have rediscovered a passion for what I do. Talis is a fantastic environment and it’s been incredible working alongside a group of extremely talented geeks. I feel like I have grown a lot this past twelve months and not only learnt new things but learnt new ways of thinking about problems”.

Talis Source - Openness and Sharing in action

Grant White, Product Marketing Co-ordinator, Talis

The Talis Platform is used to help many communities. One such being the interlending community.

Talis host a Union Catalogue that aids librarians to locate items for the purpose of interlending. Traditionally, fully partcipating to an interlending union catalogue incurred a substantial cost, a charge to contribute, a charge to search the catalogue and a subscription charge to simply have access to the system. Such business models were required to maintain large complex systems.

Last year Talis launched Talis Source a simple interlending tool and Union Catalogue built on the Talis Platform. The Talis Platform removes the complexity of hosting and maintaining such a system and therefore offers significant cost savings. Consequently, new business models can be embraced which enables and widen participation.

There is no charge to contribute holdings to the Talis Platform and there is no charge to search the shared catalogue. Talis Source also offers additional low cost functionality to send requests from the system. This enables libraries that have not traditionally participated in an interlending community can now benefit from having access. Their participation also populates the Union Catalogue with a broader range of holdings and therefore the service is more valuable to existing subscribers.

Furthermore, since holdings are contributed to the Talis Platform they not only enrich the interlending community but can be repurposed and add value to many communities. For example, libraries holdings can be reused in applications such as the Amazon plugin, Google Scholar and Cenote.

More information about Talis Source can be found on the Talis Source Web page or email grant.white@talis.com.

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