A few days ago I attended the heard Jay Jordan speak about the future of libraries at the NELINET Library Directors Forum. Among other things, he talked about the Local WorldCat pilot project as a significant shift in the way libraries will provide bibliographic information to library users. (The University of Washington Libraries is the first to launch its Local WorldCat interface.) Growing out of recent findings that nearly 90% of all information seekers begin with an Internet search engine (like Google, Yahoo, etc.), OCLC determined that making WorldCat a search engine for all of the world’s “curated” (professionally selected and cataloged) information is a way to enable libraries to compete. He suggests that OCLC can do things with its massive database and computing power that local libraries (even major research libraries) simply can’t do effectively. The premise of Local WorldCat is that libraries can benefit from an individualized interface to such enhanced data services and computing power that is delivered via the network rather through local computing resources. Though he didn’t name it, this represents a significant shift toward what is sometimes called “cloud computing.”

This morning’s NY Times article by Steve Lohr and Miguel Helft points to Google’s adoption of that strategy in much of their technology.

“To explain, Mr. Schmidt steps up to a white board. He draws a rectangle and rattles off a list of things that can be done in the Web-based cloud, and he notes that this list is expanding as Internet connection speeds become faster and Internet software improves. In a sliver of the rectangle, about 10 percent, he marks off what can’t be done in the cloud, like high-end graphics processing. So, in Google’s thinking, will 90 percent of computing eventually reside in the cloud?” (“Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft”, NY Times, Dec. 16, 2007)

Cloud computing is a significant trend that could radically change the way libraries provide access to information resources.

My earlier post about using a feed from an OCLC web service to supply data to our web site exemplifies a principle that I’ve adopted for the Theology Libraries efforts. There are a number of companies and organizations with massive computing power, and even a few smaller ones, that are able to provide data to us if we can utilize it. We need to develop the ability to mashup the data that are available to us with our own data to better serve our users.

John Wilkin’s post about the Next Generation Library Systems nicely states the principle and its corollary. We need to develop ways to make our data available to others…

We must not try to do what the network can do for us. We must find ways to facilitate integration with network services and ensure that our investment is where our role is most important (e.g., not trying to compete with the network services unless we think we can and should displace them in a key area). For example, we have recognized that Google will be a point of discovery, and so rather than trying to duplicate what they do well for the broad masses of people, we should (1) put all things online in a way that Google can discover; and (2) because we recognize that Google won’t build services in ways that serve all scholarly needs, work to strategically complement what they do.

You’ve probably been watching the development of WorldCat.Org/Identities. Over at Outgoing, Thom Hickey has several posts announcing and describing the new service.

Over the weekend WorldCat Identities went into production. Personal authors now have a link to their WorldCat Identity page under the Details tab. The links are not hard links, but actually OpenURLs.

I’ve been thinking of incorporating the data into a set of faculty publication pages. Initially, it could be as simple as links to the WorldCat pages:

• Ammerman, Nancy Tatom
• Andrews, Dale P.
• Berthrong, John H.
• Botta, Alejandro F.
• Daneel, Marthinus L.
• Darr, Katheryn Pfisterer
• …
• …
• …

The data stream is xml. with a bit of work to develop an xsl style sheet, one might feed the data directly into a web page…