Open office document formats
In August 2007, TechWatch published a report on XML-based office document standards and there are a couple of reasons why this has come to the fore this last week.
First of all, at JISC’s strategy meeting this week there was much talk of the need to support institutions dealing with antiquated administration systems that are unable to provide, for example, the kind of business intelligence that managers need. One of the things the TechWatch report did was to acknowledge that institutions were going to need to update their systems. It also provided a way for thinking about the issues that put procurement questions into a bigger picture of soon-to-be mandatory policy requirements around the need to provide information without creating vendor lock-in.
Secondly, the IEEE Internet Computing magazine has recently published an article on ODF (OpenDocument Format: The standard for Office Documents) which looks at some of the new work being undertaken by the OASIS ODF Technical Committee. To understand why this is important you really need to have read the TechWatch report first, but we think what’s interesting is the ODF Futures section. This talks about: improved support for the use of mathematical and scientific formulas in applications that make use of ODF; facilities to help applications make use of collaborative editing and semantic tagging; enhancements for accessibility. The move towards Semantic Web-type applications is particularly interesting. Rob Weir, the article’s author, argues that such tools will “let authors capture… more of what they’re thinking”.
Heroes, warriors and revolutionaries: bloodshed in the library of the future?
This afternoon I attended JISC’s Libraries of the Future conference in Oxford. I was in the Second Life version of the conference and I think I probably got the better part of the debate. Whilst the Real Life talks were OK, there wasn’t really that much I hadn’t heard before, albeit dressed up with different examples. The other Second Lifers seemed to agree and their responses to the speakers were probably more deeply interesting (in a ‘flashes of inspiration’ kind of way) than the general, bobbing along kind of interest from the floor in Real Life (RL).
One Second Lifer (SLer) called Lulu Quinnell, who seemed to be what I would call a librarian, calls herself an Information Warrior and has this on her business card. This was particularly interesting to me because I’ve just written an article for JISC’s Libraries of the Future campaign called Holding out for a Hero: technology, the future, and the renaissance of the university librarian, which was based on insights I’ve garnered from working on various TechWatch reports over the last few years. I’m certainly not pretending to have coined a term, or even a concept, but I think it’s interesting that this type of image is starting to be associated with a ‘new’ breed of librarian – another SLer, JJ Drinkwater used the term ‘Information Hero’, and Chris Batt, one of the RL speakers, used the term ‘Knowledge Warriors’.
My personal preference, based on what I’ve seen from the TechWatch perspective, is for more of an advocacy role, hence the hero (although, if you’ve read the ‘Holding out for a Hero’ piece you’ll know that I’m not averse to a bit of bloodshed where necessary). However, whilst I was listening to the conference I was wondering how ordinary, workaday librarians feel about their profession being put under a microscope like this. Do they feel a bit miffed by all these people telling them how they should do their job? Owain Blessed (another librarian SLer) said that his staff wanted more time to engage with developments in the profession and Vienna James (SL) put forward the idea of LIS graduate studies courses including courses on innovation, so it does seem like there is a real interest in engaging with both the issues and the technology. So maybe it’s just the rest of us that are antsy because perhaps we don’t feel we can see anything emerging.
In the ‘Holding out for a Hero’ piece I make the point that one of the big tasks is to make people realise that library stuff is sexy. The starting point for this has to be a question for librarians, namely: what inspires you about your job? What is it about what you do that gets you about of bed in the morning? That’s the essence of what other people will find interesting and is at the heart of what librarians, at any point in time, have to offer.
Service-Oriented Architecture and the future of the CMS
In a previous blog item I talked about the future of the institutional CMS and why TechWatch wasn’t going to commission an update to its 2001 report. You may remember that I focused on two of the main concepts from the CMS report: processes rather than products, and blurring the boundaries between systems. At the time I said that the future of the CMS is actually caught up in technological reinterpretations of these concepts, so I thought I should explain a little bit about what I meant by that.
In order to do that I need to take you back to TechWatch’s 2001 CMS report. In it, Paul Browning and Mike Lowndes, the report’s authors, list some of the processes that a CMS should facilitate (page 3). These include:
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“Engendering the re-use of information by allowing the ready integration of data from diverse sources”
“Permitting the efficient re-purposing of information”
“Allowing information maintenance to become devolved but at the same time preserving central control”
In fact, as they later acknowledge, these processes/benefits are not exclusive to CMSs and they go on to say: “The emergence of ‘portal frameworks’ (open source or otherwise) has done much to highlight the overlap and convergence of document management systems, knowledge management systems… There is a pressing need, in our view, for institutions to think holistically (reinforced by their work on information strategies) and to invest in and develop open and extensible information systems” (p.12).
This is the crux of the matter. What they are saying is that it’s the processes that are important, not the software applications per se. We need to shift the emphasis from thinking about kit to thinking about what it is we need to do and how that fits in to the bigger institutional picture.
As always, of course, this isn’t straightforward. One approach that’s being road-tested is Service-Oriented Architecture (’uppercase soa’), but this has not been without its detractors. The heart of this is for another day, but to start the ball rolling you should have a look at a case study that the e-Framework programme has just published and you’ll hopefully get a feel for how the big picture concerns raised by Paul and Mike are tackled through this particular technique.
E-books: open standards déjà vu.
TechWatch has recently been asked to contribute its thoughts on future technology developments that are likely to have the most significant impact on library and information services in higher education. It’s for Update, the journal of the Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals, and one of the interesting questions they’ve asked us is about developments that we didn’t initially anticipate or whose impact has been greater than might at first have been expected.
This is not actually a straightforward question – just because we don’t publish a report on something doesn’t mean we didn’t anticipate it – but it has prompted quite a bit of discussion. I think one of the things TechWatch may be in danger of missing is the whole e-reader development, which will present challenges in integrating e-books into academic library acquisition, discovery, and delivery systems.
At the moment there are three main devices squaring up for domination of the market: the Sony Reader (from Sony, of course), the iLiad (from iRex) and Kindle (from Amazon). One of the big issues for HE will be the document format standards used by each device.
Work is underway on an open, XML-based standard called EPUB through an organisation called the International Digital Publishing Forum. The other key standard is PDF, which is now an ISO standard. Sony’s reader supports PDF and the company has just announced that they will support EPUB in a forthcoming e-reader. By contrast, Kindle only supports Amazon’s own standards, MobiPocket and AZW. It does not support Adobe’s PDF although it provides an ‘experimental’ converter. The iLiad supports PDF and Mobipocket.
There is more than a hint of déjà vu, here. Last year TechWatch published a report on XML-based office document standards which focused on the arguments around open and proprietary standards and the difficulties that would be created by the imminent approval of a second ISO standard within the office document standards domain. You really need to read the report to get the picture, but my concern is that there may be another ODF/OOXML-type situation emerging, with Amazon taking on the role of Microsoft.
For those who would like to know more about e-readers there was a long piece in the Observer newspaper on the 27th of July, with an abridged version published online. A more technical look at matters relating to e-books, rather than the readers themselves, is provided by the team undertaking JISC’s own major investigation: the National e-books Observatory project. There is also an interesting paper, What Happened to the E-book Revolution?, by Lynn Silipigni Connaway and Heather L. Wicht, which looks at the history of e-books and some of the barriers to their widespread adoption.