Over the last couple of years, I have argued more or less strenuously for the build of an academic Flickr: a net-based service that would enable faculty and researchers to post and share images with scholarly value, either with the general community, or pursuant to any associated rights, to restricted-use populations.

While not a simple proposition, I believe that an application combining (at least some of) the rich user interaction offered by Flickr with high-value image (and potentially video) content would be seductive to both the academy and the general population. One of my motivators has been, frankly, to remove libraries and other organizational actors from unnecessary mediation. The ability of those most directly engaged with images to push content directly into a distributed system seems to me critical; assuming that a library or academic department would serve as curator or an intermediary aggregator is a surefire kiss of death for rapid adoption and widespread use.

A few days ago, I was having lunch with my friend Raymond Yee. Raymond, who has just written a book on Web 2.0 mashups, has been teaching content and service integration at the UC Berkeley I-School over the past semester. The conversation produced a "duh!" moment for me.

What I realized through the course of my conversation with Raymond was that the most critical aspect of a new Flickr like service is not really an attractive user experience. Certainly, that's essential to help find images and associate data with them; it's also what makes an application desirable enough to initiate use.

However, what will make the application ultimately successful is the availability of open services that permit re-use: mashups that encourage integration with other services and content. It is this feature - the ability to disintermediate the content, at least partially, from the restricting frame of the application - that is the most fundamentally important virtue of Flickr, and should be for any application that is premised on widespread internet adoption and use. Support for re-use enables a plethora of user experiences to be designed and developed. The needs of mobile users are distinct from highly interactive uses in in-world education, and in turn vastly different from many research imperatives.

For an academic Flickr/YouTube-like service to thrive, a well- specified and clean API that permits unimpeded access to the power of the application is the most important architectural design focus. An academic Flickr should support services for authentication, various forms of discovery, content push, content updating, and content acquisition.

Design for use.

With the advent of widely available, powerful network-based search engines, libraries are struggling to keep library services and collections at the forefront of academic research.

In the summer of 2007, the Digital Library Federation (DLF) convened a working group, the ILS Discovery Interface Task Force, to analyze the issues involved in achieving effective interoperation between traditional integrated library systems (ILS's) and internet discovery applications, and to work towards a technical proposal as a solution.

The members of the ILS-DI are:

• John Mark Ockerbloom, Univ. of Penn. (chair)
• Terry Reese, Oregon State Univ.
  
• Patricia Martin, California Digital Library
  
• Emily Lynema, North Carolina State Univ.
  
• Todd Grappone, Univ. of Southern California
• Dave Kennedy, Univ. of Maryland
  
• David Bucknum, Library of Congress
  
• Dianne McCutcheon, National Library of Medicine
  

Previous discussions among DLF members, in concert with a poll conducted in Fall 2007, confirmed that many libraries have acquired or have developed external discovery applications that re-present data from their ILS. These applications vary widely in their functionality, and include complete next-generation catalogs, specialized and multi-collection search services, tagging services, current awareness tools, and social software. Further, libraries are increasingly seeking to assemble flexible assemblages of applications and services that optimize the use of bibliographic data.

Standardized interfaces that work across different ILSs make it easier for libraries to add new applications, both open-source and vendor-supplied, that advance their customers' needs. Libraries seek interfaces that allow ILS data to be aggregated for indexing and search, that allow real-time search and query of ILS data, that support customer information and borrower services, and that allow embedding and interaction between OPACs and search interfaces.

We believe this is a significant and hallmark agreement highlighting the commitment of the library community, both not-for-profit and for-profit, to build a robust, flexible, and fertile marketplace for innovative services.

It is a foundation from which to start constructing a new generation of applications that interoperate both at the level of data, and of the individual. Together, we are moving towards an environment where our knowledge of content is easily shared across access environments, and where our ability as users to control the association of our interests and transactions with others is made fully present and empowered.

Below is a document (aka the "Berkeley Accord") that the ILS Discovery Task Force adopted in concert with the undersigned vendors as a statement in support of achieving functional integration of discovery and data.

ILS Basic Discovery Interfaces: A proposal for the ILS community.


On March 6, representatives of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), academic libraries, and major library application vendors met in Berkeley, California to discuss a draft recommendation from the DLF for standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. Such standard interfaces will allow libraries to deploy new discovery services to meet ever-growing user expectations in the Web 2.0 era, take full advantage of advanced ILS data management and services, and encourage a strong, innovative community and marketplace in next-generation library management and discovery applications.

At the meeting, participants agreed to support a set of essential functions through open protocols and technologies by deploying specific recommended standards.

These functions are:

1. Harvesting. Functions to harvest data records for library collections, both in full, and incrementally based on recent changes. Harvesting options could include either the core bibliographic records, or those records combined with supplementary information (such as holdings or summary circulation data). Both full and differential harvesting options are expected to be supported through an OAI-PMH interface.

2. Availability. Real-time querying of the availability of a bibliographic (or circulating) item. This functionality will be implemented through a simple REST interface to be specified by the ILS-DI task group.

3. Linking. Linking in a stable manner to any item in an OPAC in a way that allows services to be invoked on it; for example, by a stable link to a page displaying the item's catalog record and providing links for requests for that item. This functionality will be implemented through a URL template defined for the OPAC as specified by the ILS-DI task group.

Next steps:

The DLF ILS-Discovery Interface (ILS-DI) committee will prepare a recommendation with a new interoperability profile, "ILS Basic Discovery Interfaces" or "ILS-BDI", that includes the functions above, along with specifications of the proposed technologies (or "bindings", in the language of the recommendation).

ILS and application developers and vendors will support the ILS-BDI using the recommended bindings in future products.

The DLF will publicize these recommendations, and encourage further enhancements and cooperation between libraries, vendors, and applications developers in building more advanced, interoperable architectures for bibliographic discovery and use.

We are all committed to providing the best library services for research and learning. The agreement we are making now is an important step in advancing these services for the library users of today and tomorrow.

- Digital Library Federation, March 2008

Undersigned by:

1. Talis
2. Ex Libris
3. LibLime
4. BiblioCommons
5. SirsiDynix
6. Polaris Library Systems
7. VTLS
8. California Digital Library
9. OCLC
10. AquaBrowser
    

Abstention:

1. Innovative Interfaces, Inc.