Trends in discovery services align with HE and technology trends

trends in, and reflections on, library
discovery services
New Dawn: the changing resource discovery landscape

kenchadconsulting
February 2013

Ken Chad
Ken Chad Consulting Ltd
Twitter @kenchad
ken@kenchadconsulting.com
Te: +44 (0)7788 727 845
www.kenchadconsulting.com

how is your discovery service
aligned to your strategy?
‘strategy…a cohesive response to an important

kenchadconsulting
challenge…. ‘

'Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters'. Richard Rumelt . Profile Books 2011

..what is the challenge?
(to which your discovery service is part of a
‘cohesive response’)

kenchadconsulting

context-what is going on?

kenchadconsulting

first…. global
technology trends

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http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2209615


Mobile Device Battles
Mobile Applications and HTML5
Personal Cloud
Enterprise App Stores
The Internet of Things
Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing
Strategic Big Data
Actionable Analytics
In Memory Computing
Integrated Ecosystems


Mobile Device Battles
By 2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most
common Web access device worldwide .

The implications for IT is that the era of PC dominance with
Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a
post-PC era where Windows is just one of a variety of
environments IT will need to support.

How does your discovery service work on a mobile?


Mobile Applications and HTML5
The market for tools to create consumer and enterprise facing apps is
complex with well over 100 potential tools vendors. For the next few
years, no single tool will be optimal for all types of mobile application so
expect to employ several. However, there will be a long term shift away
from native apps to Web apps as HTML5 becomes more capable.
Developers will also need to develop new design skills to deliver touch-
optimized mobile applications that operate across a range of devices in
a coordinated fashion.

Is your discovery service ‘touch optimised?’


Personal Cloud
The personal cloud will gradually replace the PC as the location where
individuals keep their personal content, access their services and personal
preferences and center their digital lives. It will be the glue that connects the
web of devices they choose to use during different aspects of their daily lives.
Users will see it as a portable, always-available place where they go for all their
digital needs. In this world no one platform, form factor, technology or vendor
will dominate and managed diversity and mobile device management will be an
imperative. The personal cloud shifts the focus from the client device to cloud-
based services delivered across devices.

Where are your discovery services in the student’s
‘personal cloud’


Enterprise App Stores
Enterprises face a complex app store future as some vendors will limit their
stores to specific devices and types of apps forcing the enterprise to deal with
multiple stores, multiple payment processes and multiple sets of licensing
terms. By 2014, Gartner believes that many organizations will deliver mobile
applications to workers through private application stores. With enterprise app
stores the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market
manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially
an ecosystem to support apptrepreneurs.

Is your discovery service app in the institution’s
private app store yet?


Strategic Big Data
Big Data is moving from a focus on individual projects to an influence on
enterprises’ strategic information architecture. Dealing with data volume,
variety, velocity and complexity is forcing changes to many traditional
approaches. This realization is leading organizations to abandon the concept of
a single enterprise data warehouse containing all information needed for
decisions. Instead they are moving towards multiple systems, including content
management, data warehouses, data marts and specialized file systems tied
together with data services and metadata, which will become the "logical"
enterprise data warehouse.

Is data from your discovery service part of your
institution’s (or the HE sector’s) logical data
warehouse?


Actionable Analytics
Analytics is increasingly delivered to users at the point of action and in context.
With the improvement of performance and costs, IT leaders can afford to
perform analytics and simulation for every action taken in the business. The
mobile client linked to cloud-based analytic engines and big data repositories
potentially enables use of optimization and simulation everywhere and every
time. This new step provides simulation, prediction, optimization and other
analytics, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of
every business process action.

Is your discovery service empowering your decision
making?


Integrated Ecosystems
The market is undergoing a shift to more integrated systems and ecosystems
and away from loosely coupled heterogeneous approaches. Driving this trend is
the user desire for lower cost, simplicity, and more assured security. Driving the
trend for vendors the ability to have more control of the solution stack and
obtain greater margin in the sale as well as offer a complete solution stack in a
controlled environment, but without the need to provide any actual hardware.
In the mobile world, vendors including Apple, Google and Microsoft drive
varying degrees of control across and end-to-end ecosystem extending the
client through the apps.

Who is in control of your ‘ecosystem’?

next…. HE trends

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NMC Horizon Project Preview 2013 Higher Education Edition
http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2013-horizon-higher-ed-preview.pdf

Trends......

The abundance of resources and relationships made easily
accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us
to revisit our roles as educators. Institutions must consider
the unique value that each adds to a world in which information is
everywhere. In such a world, sense-making and the ability to
assess the credibility of information are paramount. Mentoring and
preparing students for the world in which they will live and work is
again at the forefront. Universities have always been seen as the
gold standard for educational credentialing, but emerging
certification programs from other sources are eroding the value of
that mission daily.

How does your discovery service enable ‘sense
making?’

Both formal and informal learning experiences are becoming
increasingly important as college graduates continue to face a
highly competitive workforce. Informal learning --learning that is self-
directed and aligns with the student’s own personal learning goals. Online
or other modern environments are trying to leverage both formal and
informal learning experiences by giving students more traditional
assignments, such as textbook readings and paper writing, in addition to
allowing for more open-ended, unstructured time where they are
encouraged to experiment, play, and explore topics based on their own
motivations. This type of learning will become increasingly important in
learning environments of all kinds.

How do your discovery services encourage
experiment, play and exploration of topics?

Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning,
hybrid learning, and collaborative models. Budget cuts have forced
institutions to re-evaluate their education strategies and find alternatives
to the exclusive face-to-face learning models. Students already spend
much of their free time on the Internet, learning and exchanging new
information — often via their social networks. Institutions that embrace
face-to-face/online hybrid learning models have the potential to leverage
the online skills learners have already developed independent of
academia. We are beginning to see developments in online learning that
offer different affordances than physical campuses, including opportunities
for increased collaboration while equipping students with stronger digital
skills.

How does your discovery enable digital skills
and collaboration?

Massively open online courses are proliferating. MOOCs have
captured the imagination of senior administrators and trustees like few
other educational innovations have. High profile offerings are being
assembled under the banner of institutional efforts like edX, and large-
scale collaborations like Coursera and the Code Academy. As the ideas
evolve, MOOCs are increasingly seen as a very intriguing alternative to
credit-based instruction. The prospect of a single course achieving
enrollments in the tens of thousands is bringing serious conversations on
topics like micro-credit to the highest levels of institutional leadership.

Where does your discovery service fit in with
your MOOC?

Open is a key trend in future education and publication,
specifically in terms of open content, open educational
resources, massively open online courses, and open access. As
“open” continues its diffusion as a buzzword in education, it is increasingly
important to understand the definition. Often mistakenly equated only
with “free,” open education advocates are working towards a common
vision that defines “open” as free, attributable, and without any barriers.

How does your discovery service work with OA,
OER etc ?

Social media is changing the way people interact, present ideas
and information, and judge the quality of content and
contributions. Educators, students, alumni, and even the general public
routinely use social media to share news about scientific and other
developments. Likewise, scientists and researchers use social media to
keep their communities informed of new developments. The fact that all
of these various groups are using social media speaks to its effectiveness
in engaging people. The impact of these changes in scholarly
communication and on the credibility of information remains to be seen,
but it is clear that social media has found significant traction in almost
every education sector

How social media savvy is your discovery
service?

There is an increasing interest in using data for personalizing the
learning experience and for performance measures. As learners
participate in online activities, they leave a vast trace of data that can be
mined for a range of purposes. In some instances, the data is used for
intervention, enrichment, or extension of the learning experience. This
can be made available to instructors and learners as dashboards so that
student progress can be monitored. In other cases, the data is made
available to appropriate audiences for measuring students’ academic
performance. As this field matures, the hope is that this information will
be used to continually improve learning outcomes

How does your discovery service contribute to
learning outcomes?

NMC Horizon Project Short List: 2013 Higher Education Edition
http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2013-horizon-higher-ed-shortlist.pdf

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less
Flipped Classroom
Massively Open Online Courses
Mobile Apps
Tablet Computing

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years
Augmented Reality
Game-Based Learning
The Internet of Things
Learning Analytics

what is going on in business?
‘enterprise’ search trends
According to Swedish search expert Kristian Norling,
these are the 6 major trends in enterprise search at
the moment:
Addressing content overload
Context
Mobile search
Search analytics
Social search
Trust as a factor

http://aarhus12.jboye.com/news/what-is-going-on-with-enterprise-
search/

what is Google doing?

‘The future of search.’ By Tom Vanderbilt
04 January 2013

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/01/fea
tures/the-future-of-search?page=all

context

"Search is by no means a solved problem”

Without context, we are stuck in what futurist Paul
Saffo calls the "Boolean prison of search".

Encased by a particular word combination and
what it statistically seems to represent ..-- we are
dragged down the paths of everyone else's
preferences.

‘search has become embedded
into everything’
In just a few years we have gone from search engines -- the
name now sounds as archaic as the Victorian "difference
engines" -- with their roots in the staid academic discipline of
information retrieval, to, simply, "search", which is much more
than an apparatus and something closer to a digital
prosthesis. As John Battelle, author of The Search, says,
"Search is now more than a web destination and a few words
plugged into a box. Search is a mode, a method of interaction
with the physical and virtual worlds. What is Siri but search?
What are apps such as Yelp or Foursquare but structured
search machines? Search has become embedded into
everything, and has reached well beyond its web-based
roots."

meaning

We once used search engines to look for information, now we
use search to find us -- what once seemed transactional now
seems an extension of ourselves.

Google does the work and understands what you want.
Understands. "As a scientist I can say 'understand' is a poorly
understood concept," says Singhal. "Even how you and I
understand something is not well understood."

understanding & meaning

take a simple word such as 'kings'. "We may find the Sacramento
Kings [basketball team], we find the TV series Kings -- we don't
understand any of this.“

However, in the search of the future that Singhal and his masters of
disambiguation are constructing in Mountain View, Google will
understand that these things are not simply matching sequences but
that they are "things" with an internet life and place and history of
their own. Based on who you are it will know which one of these, or
any other "kings", that you are seeking. And it will do so via
increasingly sophisticated methods: "be it understanding your
speech, your gestures, or what you are looking at," says Singhal.

understanding & meaning
& context

"One of the things we're trying to do is first to catalogue
everything in the world you might want to know about," he
says. "We're also trying to marry that with the knowledge
that the search engine already has about what people are
actually looking for."

understanding entities-
’things not strings’

when the user searches for "Michael Bloomberg", Google is
not looking for the web pages that contain that string of
letters, but for the entity known as Michael Bloomberg. "With
the Knowledge Graph," says Singhal, "Google has become
smarter. Search now understands that the Taj Mahal is a
building, but also a music band, a casino and a bunch of
restaurants." Things, not strings, as Google likes to say.

the way the Knowledge Graph "surfaces" this information is, a
panel of curated data, including biographical details

the ‘knowledge graph’

The larger goal of the Knowledge Graph is to enable
computers to understand the world the way humans do. "Our
computers don't have any notion of these things that we take
for granted," says Giannandrea. "We know there's a book
called Infinite Jest, written by an author, David Foster
Wallace. When I say Infinite Jest you say, 'Oh, he means that
book'. Our computers, until now, didn't have anything other
than data and text. They didn't put any meaning on text so
they couldn't understand what they had." Infinite Jest could
have been anything; now Google understands Infinite Jest as
a thing, and all its forms: hardcover, paperback, Kindle.


As much as trying to know everything, the Knowledge Graph
is about trying to work out what you want to know, parsing
the disambiguation ("did you mean?") and filtering noise.
Search is bedevilled by things like hypernyms: words that
mean the same thing as a more specific usage.

By recognising them as humans do and not just as groups of
letters, the Knowledge Graph, he says, can help "change our
understanding of user intent."


With the Knowledge Graph, Google has taken a different step
towards the future of search: providing answers, not links.
This raises the question of authority, long on the mind of
Google engineers.


This sounds like the semantic web described by Tim Berners-Lee as a "web of
data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines." As Greg
Linden, who invented Amazon's recommendation engines and founded Findory
notes, says, "I don't think we'll ever get to the semantic web as it was
envisioned -- detailed labelling and descriptions of web pages by humans -- but
we are getting closer to its goal: deep descriptions and understanding of the
web, through artificial intelligence and natural language understanding."
Google, he suggests, has decided that labelling web pages is beyond humans,
and is turning to machines.

the future of search.....

These are the pillars of Google's future of search:

the vast knowledge of user behaviour and intent it already has and is compiling
every second;

the Knowledge Graph, in which strings become things

Google's advances in artificial intelligence.

the future of search.....

Dyson notes that Bill Gates told her: "the future of search is verbs."
People, the argument goes, want search to do things, not just suggest
things. With the Knowledge Graph, Google is building a world-historical
collection of nouns. But will it help book a restaurant table? Or the
cheapest flight? As synonymous as search is with Google, much of our
search activity now occurs on apps. As Battelle notes, "the largest issue
with search is that we learned about it when the web was young. When
the universe was complete, the entire web was searchable," he says.
"Now our digital lives are utterly fractured -- in apps, in walled gardens
such as Facebook, across clunky interfaces. Reuniting our digital lives
into one platform that is searchable is, to me, the largest problem we
face today."

so what does this mean for the library?

http://www.slideshare.net/lisld/the-inside-out-library

Organizing content to support research
and learning is at the heart of the library's
institutional role.

A growing collection of technologies and tools can be

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used to more granularly organize, customize, and
personalize the online information environment to fit
professional, learning, and research activities.

‘What Technology? Reflections on Evolving Services’. By Sharon Collins (EDUCAUSE Review
online). October 30, 2009 http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/what-technology-reflections-
evolving-services

library centric discovery services

'A casual Google search may well be good enough for a daily task. But
if you are a college student conducting his or her first search for peer-
reviewed content, or an established scholar taking up a new line of
inquiry, then the stakes are a lot higher. The challenge for academic
libraries, caught in the seismic shift from print to electronic resources, is
to offer an experience that has the simplicity of Google—which users
expect—while searching the library’s rich digital and print collections—
which users need.’

'The Next Generation of Discovery The stage is set for a simpler search for users, but choosing a
product is much more complex.' By Judy Luther & Maureen C. Kelly Library Journal. 15th March 2011.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/ljinprintcurrentissue/889250-403/the_next_generation_of_discovery.html.csp

library centric discovery services

While we may settle for sufficient and convenient resources in our
everyday lives, precision (just relevant documents) and recall (all
relevant documents) are vital for scholarly information.

'The Next Generation of Discovery The stage is set for a simpler search for users, but choosing a
product is much more complex.' By Judy Luther & Maureen C. Kelly Library Journal. 15th March 2011.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/ljinprintcurrentissue/889250-
403/the_next_generation_of_discovery.html.csp

these are discovery services too..??
LORLS (Loughborough University)
http://blog.lboro.ac.uk/lorls/

Talis Aspire (Talis Education Ltd)
http://www.talisaspire.com/

rebus:list (PTFS Europe)
http://www.ptfs-europe.com/products/rebus/rebuslist/#

MyReading (University of Huddersfield)
http://library.hud.ac.uk/myreading/

EARL-Easy Access to Resource Lists (York University)
http://www.york.ac.uk/media/library/documents/guides/Linking%20to%20EARL%20in%20a%20nutshell%20.pdf

unilibri (UNILBRI ltd)
http://unilibri.com/site/

Studentreadinglists
http://www.studentreadinglists.com/

some projects & initiatives to watch

http://www.niso.org/workrooms/odi/

The Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) aims at defining
standards and/or best practices for the new generation
of library discovery services that are based on indexed
search.

http://discovery.ac.uk/

The Discovery programme is .... not about finding a single
monolithic solution to aggregating and providing search facilities for
our data, but instead our emphasis is on fostering and supporting
an ecology of reuse, as well as cultivating the conditions for
innovation to happen and services to be improved or developed.

“Open metadata creates the opportunity for enhancing impact
through the release of descriptive data about library, archival and
museum resources. It allows such data to be made freely available
and innovatively reused to serve researchers, teachers, students,
service providers and the wider community in the UK and
internationally.”

http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/knowledgebaseplus/

Library Impact Data Project
http://library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/projects/lidp/

http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/RISE/

http://mimas.ac.uk/news/2012/03/autonomy/

A meaning-based approach to search and discovery
Our challenge has always been to develop a more meaningful search experience, and
through our ongoing partnership with Autonomy, we’re deploying IDOL technology to
give researchers new ways of discovering related materials that traditional keyword
searching wouldn't find. With JISC Historic Books, Autonomy IDOL forms an
understanding of the unstructured historical documents and begins to recognize
relationships between the information. What this means is that, rather than
searching simply by a specific keyword or phrase that could have a number of
definitions or interpretations, our interface aims to understand relationships between
documents and information and recognize the meaning behind the search query.
Moving beyond standard keyword searching to meaning-based searching will give
our users results that are based on context and allow linking to other pertinent
documents.

http://www.hud.ac.uk/tali/projects/tl_project
s_11/lemon_tree/

This is a fully featured online gamification of library
activities, including awarding points and badges for
borrowing and returning items, leaving reviews,
entering the library, and using online resources.

more information
http://helibtech.com/

more information
http://libtechrfp.wikispaces.com/

trends in, and reflections on, library
discovery services
the changing resource discovery landscape
JIBS
February 2013

kenchadconsulting
Ken Chad
Ken Chad Consulting Ltd
Twitter @kenchad
ken@kenchadconsulting.com
Te: +44 (0)7788 727 845
www.kenchadconsulting.com

Trends in discovery services align with HE and technology trends

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