“inetbib” is the acronym of “internet und bibiotheken” (=internet and libraries) and is the favourite german mailing list in librarianship. More than 5.000 participants have subscribed the list and about 4-10 postings are distributed every day in this list. Since several years, there is a annual conference “inetbib”, which aims to fosten the themes of the list. This year, the conference is in Würzburg, 09.-11.04.2008. Information about the programme is available at the conferences homepage.
The “Bibliothekartag” (Librarian’s Day), the biggest conference of librarians in Germany, took place at Mannheim. 3.100 colleagues participated at many panels, workshops and meetings. The motto of the conference was “Libraries in Information Society” and one focus was “state of the art”: Where do we stay now - and in 10 years. It’s quite interesting that this topic was completed with the panel “Shakers and movers of information - where do we stand internationally?” with colleagues of UK, Australia, and Israel. At the repository of “Berufsverband Information Bibliothek” you can get the powerpoint-sheets of some of the speeches of librarian’s day.
Archivalia is the leading archive blog in Germany. In the categroy "English corner" the issues in English are concentrated. The topics are not only about archives, but also about WWW, copy right, open access, research, reference and more.
Last year the Digital Library Federation (DLF) formed the “ILS Discovery Interface Task Force“, a working group on APIs for digital libraries. See their agenda and the current draft recommendation (February, 15th) for details [via Panlibus]. I’d like to shortly comment on the essential functions they agreed on at a meeting with major library system (ILS) vendors. Peter Murray summarized the functions as “automated interfaces for offloading records from the ILS, a mechanism for determining the availability of an item, and a scheme for creating persistent links to records.”
On the one hand I welcome if vendors try to agree on (open) standards and service oriented architecture. On the other hand the working group is yet another top-down effort to discuss things that just have to be implemented based on existing Internet standards.
1. Harvesting: In the library world this is mainly done via OAI-PMH. I’d also consider RSS and Atom. To fetch single records, there is unAPI - which the DLF group does not mention. There is no need for any other harvesting API - missing features (if any) should be integrated into extensions and/or next versions of OAI-PMH and ATOM instead of inventing something new.
2. Search: There is still good old overblown Z39.50. The near future is (slightly overblown) SRU/SRW and (simple) OpenSearch. There is no need for discussion but for open implementations of SRU (I am still waiting for a full client implementation in Perl). I suppose that next generation search interfaces will be based on SPARQL or other RDF-stuff.
2. Availability: The announcement says: “This functionality will be implemented through a simple REST interface to be specified by the ILS-DI task group”. Yes, there is definitely a need (in december I wrote about such an API in German). However the main point is not the API but to define what “availability” means. Please focus on this.
3. Linking: For “Linking in a stable manner to any item in an OPAC in a way that allows services to be invoked on it” (announcement) there is no need to create new APIs. Add and propagate clean URIs for your items and point to your APIs via autodiscovery (HTML link element). That’s all. Really. To query and distribute general links for a given identifier, I created the SeeAlso API which is used more and more in our libraries.
Furthermore the draft contains a section on “Patron functionality” which is going to be based on NCIP and SIP2. Both are dead ends in my point of view. You should better look at projects outside the library world and try to define schemas/ontologies for patrons and patron data (hint: patrons are also called “customer” and “user”). Again: the API itself is not underdefined - it’s the data which we need to agree on.
Participating at the Inetbib 2008 conference in Würzburg I am pleased to see that web 2.0 usage among German librarians finally has reached the critical mass. I’d guess that we are more or less 18 month behind the situation of the vital US “library 2.0″ scene. With Inetbib 2008 we finally have a larger general library conference with open wifi and participants blogging (technorati, google blogsearch), twittering, flickring and social-networking the event (or just reading email if the speaker bores ;-). I hope that soon no more library colleauge will think that “all this internet services” are a waste of time but usefull tools to better recognize developements, ideas, and events - even outside the German biblio-blogosphere (for instance here). The next event will be BibCamp, a Library 2.0 BarCamp at March 16th/17th in in Potsdam and Berlin.
At the end of february, Mary Ellen Bates gave a workshop for the Initiative Fortbildung in Berlin. Bates provides business research to business professionals, and consulting and training services to the information industry and gives several high quality resources about online research at her homepage Bates Info, especially the famous newsletter “Tip of the Month”. She is one of those colleagues that are mentioned at the Internet Librarian Hall of Fame (archived webpage, the Bates-entrance is broken, but can be found here).
If you are interested in the program of the workshop in Berlin, you will find it as a PDF document at the homepage of Initiative Fortbildung. I’ve heard from participants, that the focus of the workshop was more research with special search engines, less the aspect of library 2.0.