Kuali Invades the UK: OLE's success in partnering with UK academic libraries.
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Presentation given on the Bloomsbury / University of London Kuali OLE (Open Library Environment) implementation at the Kuali Days conference, San Diego, CA, 20 November 2013. Kuali Days abstract: In recent years Kuali OLE has worked closely with library colleagues in the United Kingdom in order to facilitate the Bloomsbury Library Management System Consortia (BLMS) (http://www.blms.ac.uk/) in joining Kuali OLE as a development partner. In this session our London-based library experts from the Senate House Library at the University of London will talk about the current BLMS strategy for OLE adoption and implementation. Additionally, they will also discuss the tenor of community and open source software adoption in the UK library and higher education community.
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Kuali Invades the UK: OLE's success in partnering with UK academic libraries.
- 1. Kuali invades the UK OLE’s success in partnering with UK academic libraries Andrew Preater, University of London Robert McDonald, Indiana University Kuali Days, 20 November 2013
- 5. Bloomsbury Colleges + University of London = BLMS project
- 6. The Journey
- 8. Kuali OLE
- 9. Image by Sebastian Pipping, license CC-BY-SA : http://bit.ly/1dWcrCy
- 12. ILS Change
- 13. 1. OLE 1.5 sandbox November 2013
- 17. 2. Discovery WP Spring & summer 2013
- 19. Medium-term VuFind discovery VuFind discovery OLE OLE Portfolio Portfolio DAM & DAM & ePrints ePrints Adlib Adlib Archives Archives Library Library website website
- 22. Ethnography With @library_lizzie of UCL DIS
- 23. 3. Metadata optimization WP Spring 2013 onwards
- 25. 98,994 country of publication 4,122 language codes 2,133 date codes
- 26. Language coding example Of 2.4M records, 6680 coded undetermined in 008
- 27. ILS appreciation
- 28. Challenges
Hinweis der Redaktion
- If you want to tweet during the session that is me and Robert.
- I work for the University of London at Senate House. This is the central administrative body of our federal university of 18 colleges and 10 institutes.
- Senate House Libraries (plural) contains: Senate House Library (singular) a spectacular research library of about 3 million items concentrated in the arts, humanities and social sciences – also got some amazing special collections and strong in palaeography / book studies. The libraries of the School of Advanced study adding another 1 million items. These are specialist libraries of the institutes of the central university and important for their mission of research facilitation at a national level. We support research and teaching at our federal University of London as well as for researchers from about 1000 universities around the world.
- We as a group, collaboratively, decided we wanted to work together on evaluating our LMS. The two early adopters here are SOAS (School of Oriental and African studies) and Birkbeck who specialist in evening study to ‘educate busy Londoners’.
- With apologies to Brad Wheeler I am stealing this from his keynote to talk about our journey. We as a group, collaboratively, decided we wanted to work together on evaluating our ILS. At a bare minimum we wanted to work together to get to the point where we had documentation and a working toolkit so we could evaluation our ILS ourselves and do our own thing. As it turned out there was so much alignment between us and the colleges we wanted to take things forward and work together on implementation.
- The BLMS project is about shared vision and shared goals of the partner colleges and Senate House. Vision 21st Century Library Management System Flagship shared service model for UK higher ed. Goals Interoperability / integration with Shared user access to resources Open Source / Free Software theme
- 1. Library services platform Marshall Breeding on the LSP concept: “To make up for functionality absent in their core integrated library systems, many libraries implemented a cluster of ancillary products, such as link resolvers, electronic resource management systems, digital asset management systems, and other repository platforms to manage all their different types of materials. The new products aim to simplify library operations through a more inclusive platform designed to handle all the different forms of content.” http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/sep11/Breeding.shtml As a project we’ve found two substantial forks in the road. First: whether to implement a traditional LMS or something next-gen. Second: whether to choose the closed-source vendor option, or commission an Open Source option. 2. A campus-wide, enterprise system OLE is a genuine enterprise system in contrast with the historical / traditional LMS which has been ‘the has box sitting in the corner’, perhaps even a corner of the library itself. Certainly a system that doesn’t command much attention from IT or the broader university, and not something to be taken seriously as a core system. Our US partners have recognised a requirement for an enterprise approach and we agree. We think the LMS and resource discovery are about enterprise information, and should be seen as a key system enabling learning and teaching, and research. The nature of the data used means these systems are business critical for our HEIs. 3. By and for higher education The focus in OLE is on what an academic / research library wants and needs in a system. The Kuali foundation ‘gets it’ in this respect, our functional experts – librarians and library workers – sit within a foundation that includes development expertise in analysis, consultancy, and project management. We did a very thorough horizon scan as part of our review of our legacy systems in London and found OLE offered ‘something completely different’ and novel.
- A few points to unpack this a little bit. 1. Philosophical fit to HE Collaboration is fundamental in the HE sector and particularly within libraries, and the older concept of Free Software originates in HE. 2. OSS is best of breed software. OSS is (often) the best! Proprietary suppliers use OSS themselves, they choose OSS as the foundation for their development because it is stable and well-supported, and importantly flexible and free to use. OSS is licensed in a way that allows development and may be used for any purpose. One example is lots of commercial products use Apache Lucene and Apache Solr which is the same as the OLE document store. 3. OSS is a pragmatic choice for us is terms of mitigating certain risks: Vendors being bought out by another LMS vendor and forcing you on a migration path. A secure future for the system, it can’t be bought out by private equity investors. Usable source code. Vendor source code may be held in escrow but not useful to the average library if we ever needed to use it.
- These arguments I’ve made previously in favour of OLE come across well to risk-taking early innovators / early adopters but badly to the risk averse. HE as a whole is risk averse and libraries within them are at the risk averse edge.
- Brad put up something very similar yesterday – this slide pre-dates that presentation!
- Everyone loves change, right? ;-) We’ve not implemented production OLE yet so what are we actually doing? ILS change – or transformation – is our Phase One of OLE development and deployment. Collaborative spec was a big one for us. Working with subject matter expects (those staff who know the work and the requirements) in our libraries to develop a spec that describes what we need. This turned out to be much more ‘aspirational’ than the traditional UK Core Spec. We’re using Atlassian Confluence as a tool for sharing and collaboration. Everything in the SHL Confluence pages on OLE was open from the beginning – every systems librarians meeting, every conversation with the project manager long enough to take notes. Part of this is about gaining buy in from staff including ourselves as systems workers. Governance, legal, financials: Essential to cover off this stuff if you want to run an operational shared service between multiple HEIs – even with our federal structure.
- BLMS project partner SOAS recently got OLE 1.5 up and running on their VM infrastructure with assistance from HTC. This is on VMs so you can clone, wipe, and generally fold, manipulate, and abuse the ILS and quickly get back to a clean state. Likewise we can use multiple VMs easily for different purposes eg. 1 OLE for QA purposes, 1 OLE for techie dev work, 1 OLE for data loading. HTC were awesome at this and got a development version of OLE 1.5 running in about 1 day.
- OLE 1.5 dev version running at SOAS. Let’s zoom in to this screen.
- We’re editing a bib record.
- We’re setting the 008 to define this bib as a festschrift! I know, this is pretty exciting stuff.
- A work package runs inside the BLMS project to replace our current ‘discovery potpourri’ with a next-generation discovery layer. This may or may not include resource discovery as an element it doesn’t need to at first. This is a pragmatic medium-term project that gives us a good-enough discovery layer to search our local bib database, archives catalog, ePrints repository, and digital assets management server.
- Current state of play with various siloed systems. These boxes could be much more haphazard. The only real link is between LMS and Discovery right now. We using Innovative Encore having implemented that for live use in 2010 on top of our WebPAC ‘classic catalog’
- Medium term solution. The important point is we’re not looking to implement perfection next year, we’re looking to do something better. We want to search our local resources at minimum. We don’t have a resource discovery platform so that was an easier question for initial implementation.
- This will definitely deal with local bib data, and for us will have archives and ePrints included. Vufind and Blacklight are serious Open Source options for this, Vufind is especially interesting because Birkbeck, University of London are already using it live. Why Exists now, immediately useful Right expertise in our library (PHP dev expertise) Highly flexible Open Source software <3 Really awesome work done at Villanova, shout out to Dave Lacy and the team there for this for developing the connectors we need to make OLE work with VuFind.
- Screenshot of Senate House Libraries, University of London test VuFind instance. This is VuFind 2 running on a virtual machine. It’s straightforward to set up, it works, and it’s a great test-bed for decoupling discovery from legacy ILS.
- We also worked with Lizzie Atkinson at University College London who did an ethnographic study of use of catalogs in the library for her MLS dissertation. We think it’s vital to first research before deploying a system and need to take multiple routes to investigate discovery UX to understand how (if?) we modify VuFind to work for our library members. Main findings in summary: Users almost universally start a search using a basic search box The idea of location is important to users at Senate House Library ie the physical location of books and other content Facets are generally found useful – if they are noticed or understood
- Metadata optimization includes scoping reclassification and ‘tidying up’ legacy bibliographic data from previous systems migrations and integrations. Much of this goes back years but we’ve not been able to approach it except under the aegis of a ‘big project’ with central funding – this is much more engaging to university senior management. In case you were in any doubt, university SMT are not that interested in library bibliographic data. But they do care deeply about student and user experience – ie our students and researchers being able to find things in our library and catalogue that form ‘the original shared service’ at the University of London.
- Counts from “facet filtering” helps to expose problems with metadata.
- Here are some highlights. Further examples include: Invalid 006. Blank characters in the leader. No dates present in the 008. 041 fields with language codes run together (UKMARC legacy issue) We identified and updated about 105,000 problem codings in records already.
- Here is a language coding example from across the Bloomsbury College partners showing some things are really no biggie, when you have a couple of hundred problem records you can work through them manually.
- This is what the BLMS is all about. Our view of the LMS is that it is an enterprise system and we need to raise its profile at HEI level and move away from being the ‘box in the corner’ we do this by engaging: University and College SMT. OLE exists as part of a Kuali ecosystem including financials, student records – lots of potential for additional Kuali components as a good choice in future. University IT essential from early on, so much of our LMS success hinges on IT infrastructure like networking and this will only become more important if we host in the cloud. Records managers especially for data protection issues. University procurement team
- The UK view of the ILS. It’s a mature marketplace dominated by a few vendors. UK central government is actively promoting OSS, but UK HE is not taking it up. ‘Getting to yes’ on Open Source is difficult. Ben Showers (@benshowers) at Jisc has noted traditional procurement processes need to be disrupted and reshaped for the 21st century. Everyone is watching and waiting to see what happens – and for us & US partners to iron out teething problems in OLE. Looking forward, what’s the future for this? Ken Chad (@kenchad) a consultant working with UK libraries, noted several historical attempted to create co-operative shared serviced back in the 60s and 70s (one became Talis, now Capita, and one sold to III in the 90s). For me the main difference there is licensing as Open Source protect the software / IP from this fate.
- Contact me at: andrew.preater@london.ac.uk or @preater BLMS project blog: www.blms.ac.uk