Overview of content related to 'ebook'

Editorial Introduction to Issue 62: The Wisdom of Communities

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 62.

Readers of last year's issues will possibly have been aware of a small initiaitive on Ariadne's part to give practitioners with in the archives field the opportunity to voice their views on developments in their airspace. You may recall in Issue 61 an open and sincere investigation by Michael Kennedy into his views of the wider involvement of non-professionals in the generation of information for archival entries.

Get Tooled Up: Xerxes at Royal Holloway, University of London

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Anna Grigson, Peter Kiely, Graham Seaman and Tim Wales describe the implementation of an open source front end to the MetaLib federated search tool.

Rarely is software a purely technical issue, though it may be marketed as 'technology'. Software is embedded in work, and work patterns become moulded around it. Thus the use of a particular package can give rise to an inertia from which it can be hard to break free.

Moreover, when this natural inertia is combined with data formats that are opaque or unique to a particular system, the organisation can become locked in to that system, a potential victim of the pricing policies or sluggish adaptability of the software provider. The speed of change in the information world in recent years, combined with the actual or expected crunch in library funding, has made this a particular issue for library management system (LMS) users. While there is general agreement on the direction to take - more 'like Google' - LMS suppliers' moves in this direction can prove both slow and expensive for the user.

Open source software has often been suggested as an alternative, but the nature of lock-in means that the jump from proprietary to open system can be all or nothing; in effect too big (and complex) a risk to take. No major UK university libraries have yet moved to Koha, Evergreen, or indeed any open source LMS [1].

The alternative, which brings its own risks, is to take advantage of the pressures on LMS suppliers to make their own systems more open, and to use open source systems 'around the edges' [2]. This has the particular benefit of creating an overall system which follows the well-established design practice of creating a clean separation of 'view' (typically the Web interface) from 'model' (here the LMS-managed databases) and 'controller' (the LMS core code). The 'view' is key to the user experience of the system, and this separation gives the ability to make rapid changes or to integrate Web 2.0 features quickly and easily, independently of the system back-end. The disadvantage of this approach is that it is relatively fragile, being dependent on the willingness of the LMS supplier to provide a detailed and stable application programming interface (API).

There are several current examples of this alternative approach. Some, like the Vufind OPAC, allow the use of plug-ins which adapt the software to a range of different LMSs. Others, like Xerxes, are specialised front-ends to a single system (MetaLib from ExLibris [3]). This has an impact on evaluating the software: in particular, the pool of active developers is likely to be smaller in the latter case.

Royal Holloway Library Services

Within this general context, Royal Holloway Library Services were faced with a specific problem. The annual National Student Survey had given ratings to the Library well below those expected, with many criticisms centred on the difficulty in using the Library's MetaLib federated search system.

MetaLib is a key access point to the Library's e-resources, incorporating both A-Z lists of major online databases available to library users, and a federated search tool. Feedback showed that many users found the interface less than satisfactory, with one user commenting that:

'MetaLib is possibly the worst and most confusing library interface I have ever come across'

The Library Management Team decided to remedy this as a matter of urgency and set a deadline of the start of the 2009 Autumn term. There was no funding available to acquire an alternative discovery system so the challenge was to identify a low-cost, quick-win solution for the existing one. With this work in mind, the incoming Associate Director (E-Strategy) had already recruited two new colleagues over the Summer vacation: a systems officer with Web development experience, the other an experienced e-resources manager.

The first possible route to the improvement of MetaLib was modification of the existing MetaLib Web interface. This was technically possible but presented several major difficulties: the underlying ExLibris designs were based on the old HTML 4.0 and pre-dated current stylesheet-based design practice; the methods to adapt the designs were opaque and poorly documented, based on numbered variables with semantics that changed depending on context; and perhaps most importantly, the changes were to be made over the summer months, giving no time for user feedback on the details of the changes to be made.

The second possibility was the use of Xerxes [4]. Xerxes offered the advantage of an interface design which had been user-tested on a range of (US) campuses, partially solving the user feedback issue. It was not, however, entirely cost-free, as ExLibris charges an annual maintenance fee for the MetaLib X-server API on which Xerxes depends.

eBooks: Tipping or Vanishing Point?

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Emma Tonkin investigates ebooks and takes a look at recent technological and business developments in this area.

Due in large part to the appearance since mid-2006 of increasingly affordable devices making use of e-Ink technology (a monochrome display supporting a high-resolution image despite low battery use, since the screen consumes power only during page refreshes, which in the case of ebooks generally represent page turns), the ebook has gone from a somewhat limited market into a real, although presently still niche, contender. Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles in 2008 [1]; Sony sold 300,000 of its Reader Digital Book model between October 2006 and October 2009. In September 2009, ebooks represented between 1% and 3% of the total US publishing market [2].

Following the JISC National eBooks Observatory Study [3] in the UK, one participant, David Nicolas, was quoted as stating that ebooks have 'reached the tipping point' [4]. Keeping in mind Bohr's statement that, 'prediction is very difficult, especially about the future', it's nonetheless safe to say that publicity about these devices is currently at a high point. But for ebook readers, as Figure 1 shows, this is not their first time in the spotlight.

"A good book has no ending. ~R.D. Cumming"

This article marks the third time that Ariadne has discussed the subject of ebooks, namely "Ebooks in UK Libraries: Where are we now?" [5] and "e-Books for the Future: Here But Hiding?" [6]. There is something very beguiling about the idea of a book that has 'the marvelous chameleon-like quality that it can very quickly be made to substitute for a different printed work by simply loading different content' [7] - a book that can play the role of a library.

As Striphas [8] points out, the concept of the electronic book, and the exploration of the interaction between the size of a container and the quantity of knowledge held, has an extraordinarily long history. He traces the idea back to the creation of miniature manuscript books, composed of 'tiny handwriting, or micrographia', in the late 15th century, which were functional objects and could be read by means of a magnifying glass.

Striphas notes the development of microphotography techniques in the 19th century. This was initially pioneered by John Benjamin Dancer, an optical instrument-maker who combined microscope and camera in order to create the earliest example of microphotography on record [9]. Luther reports that 'the 21 May 1853 issue of Notes and Queries carried a letter from a Dublin scholar asking "May not photography be usefully applied to the making of catalogues of large libraries?' Microphotography led to the report in the British Photographic Journal of, 'A page of printing, from Quekett's "Treatise on the Microscope", reduced to such size that the whole of the volume of 560 pages could be contained in a space one inch long and half-an-inch broad ' [8].