On February 8-9, 2007 I had the opportunity to visit the University of Rochester River Campus and meet with a number of very smart people to discuss a thing called XC (eXtensible Catalog, extensiblecatalog.info). This travel log documents the experience.
stained glass window |
Universalist Church |
The XC initiative is hosted by the University of Rochester and led by a set of co-principle investigators: Ron Dow, Jennifer Bowen, Nancy Foster, and David Lindahl. Financial support is being and has been provided by the Mellon Foundation. XC is designed to resolve many if not most of the issues outlined above. It wants to partner with many institutions who posses the necessary skills (traditional library experience, graphic & user-centered design, software engineering, governance and business knowledge, etc.) to address the problems, articulate solutions, outline schedules, and finally implement solutions in long-term and sustainable ways.
The purpose the XC meeting was to discuss all of these things in greater detail.
Group XC |
Rush Rhees Library |
library movie |
The real event got started the next day in the Rush Rhees Library. It was attended by approximately thirty people from twenty institutions: Andrew Mellon Foundation, Ann Arbor District Library, California Digital Library, California State University, Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois, Cornell University, Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia Public Libraries Service, Johns Hopkins University, Library of Congress, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, North Carolina State University, OCLC, Oregon State University, University of Aarhus (Denmark), University of California, Berkeley, University of California, San Diego, and the University of Notre Dame.
The first half of the meeting was devoted to introductions, outlines of future plans, discussion of metadata issues, and demonstrations. For example, the XC Project Overview consists of three phases. Phase 1 includes identifying potential partners in the project, deciding on metadata and software issues, and doing reviews of the literature. Phase 2 includes building software, working with partners, doing user research, and deploying software. Phase 3 includes doing maintenance of the software, supporting the software using an open source model, extending functionality, and developing sustainable support.
Jennifer Bowen outlined some of their thoughts regarding metadata. For example, they hope to include both digital and non-digital items in XC. There will be need for multiple schemas describing different sets of content. "One size does not fit all." At the same time there will be the need for internal schemas, and they are leaning towards MODS, MADS, and METS. There is also a desire to FRBR-ize the content and provide faceted browsing. This will mean some restructuring of the data as it is incorporated into XC. They also hope to exploit OAI-PMH as well as OAI-ORE to both harvest content from remote sites as well as expose content from XC to outside communities.
Of great interest was C4. This demonstrated prototype application worked a lot like the profession's desires for metasearch: 1) regularly dump the content of a library catalog, 2) parse the metadata to create "facets", 3) combine the content with non-library content such as things mirrored from the Web or institutional repositories, 4) index the content with a non-proprietary indexer, 5) provide Web-based access to the index, 6) display search results complete with cover art and integrated results from Google, blogs, etc, and 7) search commercial indexes/databases in the background using screen-scraping and federated search techniques. Just about everybody in the room vigorously nodded their heads in approval, but it is important to understand the vision for XC goes well beyond the demonstration of C4.
system architecture |
The second layer is the XC "Platform" where the content is imported, stored, indexed, transformed into various metadata formats, exported, searched, protected against unauthorized access, and re-distributed.
The third layer is a "canned" Web browser interface to the Platform. This interface is analogous to the out-of-the-box interfaces provided by many of the profession's integrated library systems. This interface is intended for those institutions who do not have the desire or expertise to create the more customized interfaces in the last layer.
The last layer is a set of Web Services interfaces to the Platform allowing libraries to syndicate and incorporate XC (think, "library") content into things like a website, a content management system, a campus-wide portal, or a course management system. In today's world it is not about getting people to come to your website. Rather, it is about putting your content in their context and their websites. The Web Services interface satisfies this need.
XC is not intended to be built solely by the folks at Rochester. Instead they propose developing relationships with partners. There are five different types of partnerships:
Thus, each institution who partners with XC will have different sets of responsibilities. Since XC is designed to built on the output of existing integrated library systems, XC is looking to build relationships with at least one institution running each of the major systems.
eagle |
Ford Street Bridge |
sunset |
Personally, I sincerely believe XC is on the right track. For example, their track record regarding user-centered design in libraries is probably the best in the country. Their software and Web presence decisions are made on direct, measurable, and well-documented user behavior. Second, they have (or had) representatives on the RDA committee, thus their understanding of metadata issues is strong and their advocacy for the use of XML comes from a broad understanding of cataloging principles. Third, the systems architecture is well thought out. Modular. Componentized. Easily expandable.
Yes, building something like XC is a lot of work, but the time spent on such projects is not wasted. Not only will the end product be something that will solve immediate problems, but it will have a number of side benefits as well. It will bring collections, systems, acquisitions, and reference communities within libraries together on a single project. The process will increase the profession's knowledge of what computers can and cannot do. "This is not rocket surgery." It will enable libraries to be in greater control of their own data and information. It will enable libraries to be better equipped in meeting the changing expectations of their users. It will foster a greater number of standards-compliant implementations. It will enable libraries to bring together and provide interfaces to the wide range of library-related materials: things in catalogs, content from institutional repositories, items from special collections, scholarly materials freely available on the Web.
Communities and cooperation are a large part of what it means to be libraries. If libraries were to pool their resources and work together, I am certain the sum will be greater than its parts. XC is a manifestation of this idea.
Author: Eric Lease Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>
Date created: 2007-02-16
Date updated: 2007-03-16
URL: http://www.library.nd.edu/daiad/morgan/travel/xc-2007/
All libraries:
Architecture | Art
Image | Business Information Center
| Chemistry & Physics
| Engineering | Hesburgh
(Main)
Kellogg/Kroc Information Center |
Life Sciences | Mathematics
| Rare
Books & Special Collections | Radiation
Lab | Kresge Law
