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- 1. Cut it Out: Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency with Next-Generation Library Systems Susan Stearns, Ex Libris Bob Gerrity, Boston College Ann-Marie Breaux, YBP Library Services John Larson, Ex Libris ALA Annual Conference ⃒ June 27, 2010
- 2. Copyright Statement All of the information and material inclusive of text, images, logos, product names is either the property of, or used with permission by Ex Libris Ltd. The information may not be distributed, modified, displayed, reproduced – in whole or in part – without the prior written permission of Ex Libris Ltd. TRADEMARKS Ex Libris, the Ex Libris logo, Aleph, SFX, SFXIT, MetaLib, DigiTool, Verde, Primo, Voyager, MetaSearch, MetaIndex and other Ex Libris products and services referenced herein are trademarks of Ex Libris, and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. All other product names, company names, marks and logos referenced may be trademarks of their respective owners. DISCLAIMER The information contained in this document is compiled from various sources and provided on an "AS IS" basis for general information purposes only without any representations, conditions or warranties whether express or implied, including any implied warranties of satisfactory quality, completeness, accuracy or fitness for a particular purpose. Ex Libris, its subsidiaries and related corporations ("Ex Libris Group") disclaim any and all liability for all use of this information, including losses, damages, claims or expenses any person may incur as a result of the use of this information, even if advised of the possibility of such loss or damage. © Ex Libris Ltd., 2010
- 5. “ Efficiency cuts are no longer enough and some serious thinking about the future shape of services and provision is needed.” The Economic Downturn and Libraries: Survey Findings. CIBER, UCL, London: December, 2009.
- 6. Challenges for libraries in difficult economic times
- 10. URM: Reducing TCO Example of a portion of an automated workflow in URM Automated Processing Analyze Change Log Exception Rules Actions Automatic Manual Informational
- 11. URM: Reducing TCO Interoperability with external and third party systems Discovery Selection Inventory Acquisition Fulfillment Activation Publication User Mgmt SIS CMS Vendor ERP
- 12. URM: Reducing costs AND improving services
- 15. My world in 2000 Website ILS BC Datacenter CD-ROM Server
- 16. My world in 2010 ILS Website Digital Repository Journal Publishing Proxy Discovery Federated Search ILL/ DocDel ERM Link Resolver
- 17. My world in 2015? Discover/ Delivery Unified Resource Management
- 20. Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (turn and face the strain) Thanks to Anne Kenney, Cornell University
- 24. Box of books that don ’t circulate much Count of Uncirculated Items - O'Neill Library Total Item LC Class Count in 10 Years % Count in 5 Years Count A General Works 1,208 17.05% 2,180 30.76% 7,087 B Philosophy, Psychology, Religion 54,523 31.77% 87,021 50.71% 171,604 C Auxiliary Sciences of History 3,413 46.81% 4,870 66.79% 7,291 D World History 31,960 35.32% 52,025 57.49% 90,490 E History of the Americas 6,290 22.58% 12,442 44.67% 27,854 F History of the Americas 8,362 35.61% 13,494 57.47% 23,479 G Geography, Anthropology, Recreation 4,101 26.85% 7,809 51.12% 15,276 H Social Sciences 71,045 43.23% 102,942 62.64% 164,346 J Political Science 16,897 40.98% 24,498 59.41% 41,233 K Law 2,493 23.45% 4,860 45.71% 10,633 L Education 19,792 38.99% 29,179 57.48% 50,767 M Music 7,681 37.98% 11,810 58.40% 20,223 N Fine Arts 24 31.17% 39 50.65% 77 P Language and Literature 112,534 42.26% 165,461 62.13% 266,315 Q Science 38,062 41.25% 59,784 64.80% 92,261 R Medicine 14,518 27.89% 26,518 50.95% 52,050 S Agriculture 1,121 46.09% 1,654 68.01% 2,432 T Technology 8,467 45.91% 12,202 66.16% 18,442 U Military Science 977 19.92% 2,274 46.37% 4,904 V Naval Science 144 25.17% 287 50.17% 572 Total: 403,612 37.81% 621,349 58.21% 1,067,336 Percentage of books that have not circulated in 5 years = 58.21 Percentage of books that have not circulated in 10 years = 37.81
- 29. ?!
- 30. A better way…
- 34. Book Vendors and Workflow Efficiency: 13 Years of Evolution
- 36. Book Vendors and Workflow Efficiency: Collection Development
- 37. Book Vendors and Workflow Efficiency: Collection Development
- 49. Automating processes in acquisitions NO YES YES NO Approved Selection Includes Vendor? Includes Price? Group onto PO Assign Vendor Send to Task List Add Price
- 53. Digitization request lifecycle Digitize Resource located Request approved Copyright clearance Fulfillment plan Route to digitization Move to next request Pick up item Digitization plan Deliver Deposit Digitization Request
- 55. Digitization request lifecycle Digitize Resource located Request approved Copyright clearance Fulfillment plan Route to digitization Move to next request Pick up item Digitization plan Deliver Deposit Digitization Request
- 56. Digitization: Paging task list
- 58. Selection (view other options)
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Each of the 4 of us will be providing a slightly different perspective on today ’s topic. I will start off setting the stage. Bob will then give us a a perspective from a library administrator. Ann-Marie will focus in more detail on specific aspects of TCO relating to collection development, giving us both a bit of historical perspective on what we have already done to reduce inefficiencies in these areas and looking at some of the new hurdles we face as we deal with the increasingly complicated world of library technical services. Finally, John will finish off this morning ’s session with some examples of how we are designing for lowered TCO in the context of the Ex Libris next generation service, URM. And, we hope to allow time at the end for your questions and comments.
- Although we have many fine organizations here in the US writing about the future of libraries, one of the organizations whose research I often find most interesting is CIBER, which is based at University College London. The quote above is from a survey they did in 2009 of 835 libraries in 61 countries, primarily academic and mainly large and medium in size. Throughout the quotes of those who responded, we find not only the challenge of how to reduce costs of services but also the clear acknowledgement that this is not enough: services must be improved and added if the library is to more clearly demonstrate its value within the institution and garner a piece of the pie larger enough to sustain it in years to come.
- This graphic is from a recent [March, 2010] report by the Research Information Network in the UK done in association with SCONUL – the Society of College, National and University Libraries, also in the UK It is somewhat of a follow-up to the CIBER survey I mentioned and is subtitled: “A guide for senior institutional managers and policy makers”. While – as they admit – library directors as yet have few concrete proposals to transform services or yield large-scale savings in light of the current financial environment, there are some clear themes: Seek a closer understanding of the relationship between library activities on the one hand and learning and research outcomes on the other – in other words, be able to more clearly demonstrate [and communicate] the value of the library to the institution. While many libraries have been developing new services that are more closely tied to these nstitutional missions – open access initiatives, projects for data curation and preservation, etc. these services are at risk due to lack of resources [and, in some cases, the wrong type of resources, particularly as relates to staff]. Cooperation with other libraries is probably the only way to achieve significant cost savings while sustaining momentum. This may be easier to achieve is a smaller, more closed environment such as Higher Education in the UK, but even if we don ’t see cooperation as the only way, it is certainly a major thrust of libraries across North America. The biggest challenge many libraries have in putting major programs of cooperation in place is that they have few tools, particularly on the systems side, to support such cooperation. One of our goals as we develop URM is to better facilitate and encourage cooperation by providing workflows that support it.
- Rick Anderson from the University of Utah is one of my favorite library “commentators”. In a recent posting online, Rick reminded us that as we look to how we can best re-define library services moving forward, we need to ensure we are asking the right questions. These are the questions that he suggests: Who are our primary constituents – are we developing services primarily for a large undergraduate population or do we need to balance services to students with a major investment in faculty-facing offerings? What problems are we solving for them? And, I would add – are these problems that our constituents believe need to be solved? How can we or they tell whether or not we are actually solving the problems – it is difficult to demonstrate value if your constituency does not actually see clear results. And, finally – which of our processes and practices make the most difference? This is a question that we have been asking our Development Partners for Ex Libris ’ next generation library service, URM, with regularity as we look to designing new services that focus on support of the processes and workflows that deliver the most value within the library.
- One way of focusing on cost reduction is to analyze TCO. TCO stands for “Total Cost of Ownership” and is a quantitative and sometimes also qualitative tool that is used to estimate the direct and indirect costs associated with a particular asset or acquisition, typically calculated over the entire life cycle of the asset. TCO includes not only the costs associated with acquiring a product or service, but also the costs associated with OPERATING that product or service. Here you see some of the major cost drivers for TCO for systems such as today ’s ILS and erm environments. Many of these are related to the capital expenses associated with deployment and maintenance of our local systems. Others are more intangible and still others are the most difficult to quantify – the Opportunity Costs. In the case of our library systems, these opportunity costs often refer to the ability to re-direct staff to new initiatives, often vastly more important than maintenance of a local ILS server. As we develop next generation services for libraries, as vendors we must focus not only on reducing the tangible and intangible costs, we must also ensure we are designing for new services.
- Although John Larson will go into a bit more detail on some of these points, I want to focus on the major ways in which a service such as the Ex Libris URM – Unified Resource Management – service will reduce TCO for libraries. First – the advantages of having both Software and Data in the Cloud - One of the major differences between URM and today ’s traditional ILS and related library systems is that we expect the primary deployment of URM to be Software-as-a-Service – as a cloud service. There are many advantages of this for our customers as well as for Ex Libris. By having the URM software cloud-based, we reduce the need for customers to create and maintain a local infrastructure to support URM – no need to purchase and maintain local servers and data storage; no expenses associated with the real estate and utility costs associated with housing these servers and no staff time required to maintain the local IT environment. And, because URM is SaaS, there is no need to load service packs and new software releases: these are provided as central services in the cloud by Ex Libris. Equally if not more important is that fact that with URM, we are also bringing DATA to the cloud. URM includes a set of centralized data services, including a metadata management environment, that allows customers to access metadata records licensed by Ex Libris on behalf of the community and facilitates sharing of metadata. With aggregation of data in the cloud a new set of reporting and analysis tools become possible, leveraging the network intelligence. Ex Libris is offering one such aggregated data service already in bX, our scholarly recommender service which analyzes a large aggregation of usage data from link resolvers such as SFX. John Larson will be talking a bit more about how we leverage the metadata management service, particularly what we call the Community Zone, a bit later. The second major impact on reducing TCO in a next-generation service such as URM relates to the fact that we are UNIFYING workflows across print, electronic and digital resources. John, too, will focus a bit more on this, but in general, with URM there is no need to maintain sepraate applications for print, electronic and digital content as we do today with our ILS, erm and digital asset management systems. Nor do your staff need to learn different workflows, manage staff users across these applications and duplicate data. We expect quite significant savings in staff time as a result of this unification of workflows.
- Finally, URM looks at reducing TCO through more effective interoperability with external and third party systems. Much of the work we do with our library systems today involves interfacing and interoperating with these external systems. These may be systems operated by our vendors – YBP being an excellent example – or systems that exist elsewhere within our institution on which we rely, such as a campus student information system. With URM, we are looking closely at how we can more effectively interoperate with these systems. In some cases this is a fairly simple matter of automating tasks relating to importing and exporting data; in other cases it means minimizing the amount of duplicate data we house in URM with more effective services that link to external systems. And, because URM is built using the Ex Libris Open Platform approach, all of the services and API ’s are documented and made available to customers so that individual extensions can easily be developed for sharing with the larger URM community.
- But wait, there ’s MORE!!! as Ron Popeil and Billy Mays taught us to say. With URM all of the services being developed look BEYOND the goal of reducing TCO to creating an infrastructure for NEW services. Some of the new services made possible are obvious: The centralized data services environment offers opportunities for new aggregations of content as well as ways of looking at transaction related information not only at an institutional level but across institutions A community metadata environment creates possibilities for new models for metadata management and for sharing of metadata Unified management of resources better allows our back-office services, such as URM, to most effective support not only unified DISCOVERY of resources in front-end systems, but also unified DELIVERY of print, electronic and digital content in ways that go beyond today ’s traditional resource sharing models and best demonstrate the value of library services. But others may be less obvious – as we look to the future and retool our libraries, our systems and our staff for the future, I expect [and hope actually] that there will be some surprises for all of us. Thank you. Bob.
- Each of the 4 of us will be providing a slightly different perspective on today ’s topic. I will start off setting the stage. Bob will then give us a a perspective from a library administrator. Ann-Marie will focus in more detail on specific aspects of TCO relating to collection development, giving us both a bit of historical perspective on what we have already done to reduce inefficiencies in these areas and looking at some of the new hurdles we face as we deal with the increasingly complicated world of library technical services. Finally, John will finish off this morning ’s session with some examples of how we are designing for lowered TCO in the context of the Ex Libris next generation service, URM. And, we hope to allow time at the end for your questions and comments.
- So Susan has given us a nice overview of some of the pressures libraries face in the current economic climate, and how the architecture and design of URM offer not only an opportunity to reduce overall costs and improve operational efficiency, but also will enable libraries to deliver new services to users. I ’d like to drill down into this a bit from the library perspective. I will talk about areas in which we need to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and the part we see URM playing in these goals. More interesting, I think, is what the efficiencies and cost savings will allow us to do in terms of developing NEW services that add value and that connect with users where it’s useful for them, rather than where it’s convenient for us.
- When I arrived at Boston College 10 years the library systems environment was much simpler than it is today. We had three primary systems to support: our at-the-time next-generation integrated library system (Aleph, replacing NOTIS), a Citrix CD-ROM server hosting a few dozen reference databases, and the library website, hosted on a rudimentary home-grown content management system developed by campus IT. Our campus group hosted and managed the hardware for all three systems. In terms of library technology staff, we had two systems librarians supporting the ILS, no dedicated support for the CD-ROM server, and a webmaster supporting the library website, which consisted primarily of static HTML pages.
- Fast forward to the present. Life is a lot more complicated now. Reflecting the shift from print to electronic, first with journals and more recently with books, coupled with a growing emphasis on digitization of our locally held special collections, we ’ve introduced a variety of standalone, function-specific library systems that are now the focal point of much of our user traffic. The only thing that’s gone away (thankfully) is the CD-ROM server. The current suite of systems lives on a total of 17 physical servers, all hosted locally either in the library or at our campus data center. Besides significant investment in hardware, network equipment, power management, disk storage, etc., our current library systems account for significant amount of our campus IT’s staff resources for system administration, database administration, disaster planning and recovery, network services support, and so on. In the library, we’ve added several technical positions supporting our e-resources management system, the digital repository, systems integration.
- .]
- Susan started off with a quote from the CIBER report on the economic downturn and libraries indicating that efficiency cuts are no longer enough—we need some serious thinking about the future shape of library services. I think that while improved efficiency in all areas of library operations is important, focusing too much on efficiency can sometimes obscure bigger issues and questions that we should be dealing with. When I think about our operations at BC and how we can improve efficiency, I always like to also consider the effectiveness of what we ’re doing as well as how efficiently we’re doing it. Back-room operations are obviously one big area of library operations that should be continually looked at with a view to reducing overhead costs through improved efficiencies. It’s often difficult for staff to look beyond the specific back-room task or workflow and think about how it contributes to delivering better service to end users. The “we’ve always done it this way” approach often interferes. Frankly, one of the reasons we chose to become development partners with Ex Libris on their next generation system was that it would help facilitate our internal efforts to dramatically simplify and streamline all back-end operations related to print, by forcing staff to look at the future and to embrace the “unified” element in URM. Stop doing things that no longer make sense: examples---in cases where we get “free” print journals with an e-subscription with permanent access rights, we should spend little or no effort on processing, shelving, binding, saving the print. Eliminate redundancies: [example] Leverage web-scale services: A good example of this at BC is related to what I ’ll politely describe as a disconnect between our historical just-in-case, title-by-title selection philosophy in the world of mass digitization initiatives such as Google books. We have selectors who still want to hand select digitized out-of-copyright material for inclusion in our catalog, rather than take advantage of the openness of Hathi Trust and other initiatives to share, for mass harvesting, hundreds of thousands of bib. records digitized books with no access restrictions.
- Susan mentioned Rick Anderson as one of her favorite library commentators. David Lewis from IUPUI is one of mine, and in particular I ’ve adopted some of the elements of his 2007 white paper “A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21 st Century” to drive discussions at Boston College about where we should be headed. The five key points that Lewis makes are: (1) completing as quickly as possible the transition from print to electronic collections, (2) “retire” legacy print collections, (3) repurpose library space to meet the needs of modern library users (more seats, more technology, more flexibility), (4) reposition library and information tools, resources, and expertise, and (5) migrate the focus of collections from purchasing material to curating content.
- While those five strategies seem to me to be perfectly reasonable and obvious, but many of my colleagues at BC would disagree.
- I ’d like to start by going back to the set of questions Rick Anderson says we should ask ourselves as we’re attempting to re-define library services, and suggest how we look at these at Boston College. Who are our primary constituents – are we developing services primarily for a large undergraduate population or do we need to balance services to students with a major investment in faculty-facing offerings? What problems are we solving for them? And, I would add – are these problems that our constituents believe need to be solved? How can we or they tell whether or not we are actually solving the problems – it is difficult to demonstrate value if your constituency does not actually see clear results. And, finally – which of our processes and practices make the most difference? This is a question that we have been asking our Development Partners for Ex Libris ’ next generation library service, URM, with regularity as we look to designing new services that focus on support of the processes and workflows that deliver the most value within the library.
- Our three primary user populations at BC are faculty, grad. students, and undergrads.
- A problem we ’ve been historically good at is providing building and housing large collections of what used to be scarce resources: scholarly print materials. Paul Courant describes this as the “big box of books” function, which is increasingly less important as e-formats predominate for new scholarly material and mass digitization projects like Google Books and the Open Content Alliance replicate significant portions of our print collections in digital formats. [Add Slide on OCLC research statistics on overlap between average ARL library collection and Google Books/Hathi Trust]
- Formal assessment activities like LibQual are obviously one way of trying to determine whether we ’re solving our user’s problems or not. Although perhaps outdated in some of the areas it assesses, LibQual is good at identifying gaps between user expectations and the services we actually deliver. For those of you not familiar with LibQual, the survey includes 21 questions covering three broad categories: service affect, information control, and library as place. We recently conducted LibQual at BC and the radar chart here shows the summary results for all groups surveyed (faculty, grad. Students, undergrads, and staff). Like many of our peers, we tend to do well in the service affect questions, and less well (more yellow and even a little red) in the information control and library as place questions. [MORE]
- libqual results With the detailed results by group we can drill down into specifics for our primary constituent groups. The information I find most useful from LibQual are the question responses indicating the biggest gap between user expectations and user ratings of what we ’re actually delivering. There are some clear “areas needing improvement” across all three primary constituent groups, and some areas specific to each groups. For undergrads, space issues dominate the “areas needing improvement.” Our big box of books prevents us from providing the adequate user spaces for quiet and group study. For grad. Student, concerns are split between study space and easy access to more electronic resources. Faculty are most concerned about collection gaps, both print and electronic. All groups expressed a desire for more e-resources and better access to them.
- Another way to help determine whether we ’re solving our users’ problems or not is to identify usage trends.
- [Need graphic] Make the most difference: Relevant to work students are doing (LibGuides) Context aware services (course reading, database recommender) Navigation (stack maps) Mobile services Make the least difference: Inside-out approaches (request forms unconnected to user context) Just in case selection (ebrary example) Legacy print processes (serials checkin, serials binding) Complex access policies
- [Need graphic] Make the most difference: Relevant to work students are doing (LibGuides) Context aware services (course reading, database recommender) Navigation (stack maps) Mobile services Make the least difference: Inside-out approaches (request forms unconnected to user context) Just in case selection (ebrary example) Legacy print processes (serials checkin, serials binding) Complex access policies
- [Need graphic] Make the most difference: Relevant to work students are doing (LibGuides) Context aware services (course reading, database recommender) Navigation (stack maps) Mobile services Make the least difference: Inside-out approaches (request forms unconnected to user context) Just in case selection (ebrary example) Legacy print processes (serials checkin, serials binding) Complex access policies
- [Need graphic] Make the most difference: Relevant to work students are doing (LibGuides) Context aware services (course reading, database recommender) Navigation (stack maps) Mobile services Make the least difference: Inside-out approaches (request forms unconnected to user context) Just in case selection (ebrary example) Legacy print processes (serials checkin, serials binding) Complex access policies
- [add photos/screenshots: study rooms, online reservations, level 1 booths, stackmaps, mobile interfaces]
- Each of the 4 of us will be providing a slightly different perspective on today ’s topic. I will start off setting the stage. Bob will then give us a a perspective from a library administrator. Ann-Marie will focus in more detail on specific aspects of TCO relating to collection development, giving us both a bit of historical perspective on what we have already done to reduce inefficiencies in these areas and looking at some of the new hurdles we face as we deal with the increasingly complicated world of library technical services. Finally, John will finish off this morning ’s session with some examples of how we are designing for lowered TCO in the context of the Ex Libris next generation service, URM. And, we hope to allow time at the end for your questions and comments.
- Each of the 4 of us will be providing a slightly different perspective on today ’s topic. I will start off setting the stage. Bob will then give us a a perspective from a library administrator. Ann-Marie will focus in more detail on specific aspects of TCO relating to collection development, giving us both a bit of historical perspective on what we have already done to reduce inefficiencies in these areas and looking at some of the new hurdles we face as we deal with the increasingly complicated world of library technical services. Finally, John will finish off this morning ’s session with some examples of how we are designing for lowered TCO in the context of the Ex Libris next generation service, URM. And, we hope to allow time at the end for your questions and comments.