Web Services and the future library interface

What are Web Services, and why should you care?
Who came up with this terrible confusing name?  Isn't a web page a web service?
I think the important thing is not to get tangled in technology and terminology.
Web Services are just a way to implement standard communications and information integration.
Web Services is an unfortunate choice of terminology, Network Information Integration and Communications Services might have been better. 
Anyway, I think you have to take care to first understand the high-level concepts of things before you dive into the details.

The reality is, practically nothing we create is completely original.
We combine bits and pieces of information from other sources and add some small amount of our own insight.  A research paper is composed of some original research and a huge cloud of citations.  A blog posting, like this one, is some commentary mixed with many many links from other sources.  We stand on the shoulders of giants.

But in the current library interface, we stand on the shoulders of a single Titan, Atlas, holding up our library world.  That means you are stuck with only the unique integrated capabilities provided by your OPAC vendor.

That is simply not a sustainable approach, because it does not enable you to draw upon the information and creativity available on the rest of the Internet.  A single OPAC vendor simply can't keep up with these developments.  By the time they add book reviews, the latest web thing will be holographic book theatre or some such.

That's where Web Services come in.  Web Services have a two-fold power:
1) They allow you to provide YOUR library information in ways that enable anyone on the Internet to manipulate, analyze and process it
2) They allow you to access information and services from all over the web for your own use, combining those infoservices in ways that make sense for you

The future library interface is mostly about you combining services in interesting ways for your users.
Imagine that as the user is out surfing on the web, any time there is a link to a book or an article that is available at your library, a button automatically is inserted on the web page: "Get This Locally".  Imagine also that when they click the button, they get not just your OPAC display, but a combination of OPAC information, book reviews, relevant links to other sites, tagging capability, wishlists...

That is what Web Services is all about.  Don't get buried in OASIS committee standards.  Think capability, not technical details.

Do we need a library community group to get together and start working on ideas for library-centric Web Services?

Here's what other people have been saying and doing about this idea:
There is an industry group of OPAC vendors called VIEWS that is working on standards, I have written about it previously.

Yahoo has not only released a new service for bookmarking web pages (including a saved copy of the page), but they have also exposed the new information with Web Services

We've also exposed this public data through a couple of webservice functions. listFolders lets you get the public folders associated with a Yahoo! ID, and listUrls lets you retreive the URLs from any of those folders. There's a lot of potential in these functions, and we're looking forward to seeing some applications using them.

OCLC blogs about related ideas:

Convenience is crucial to future library services ... Which leads nicely into our discussion of Amazon/Google. Fast and easy search is usually preferrable to rich and comprehensive results...in the world of our library users. ... get the library out where the people are. Embed it in the devices they use already--and will use tomorrow, and make sure we add our value to our already information-saturated experiences. ... vision (as I heard it) is for libraries to plug in to the rest of the world. It's not us vs. them--it's us AND them.

You need to think of your library information as a resource.  It's not a resource for people to COME to, it's a resource for you to expose for discovery and use by other computer systems and individuals.  Web Services are one way to expose your info.  Enabling deep linking is another.  Blogging about your latest developments, aquisitions and publications is another way to expose your latest info to people.

OCLC is doing a lot in the Web Services area.  Jeff Young is working on

the Metadata Switch project developing web services and clients. This includes unconventional applications of our open-source OAICat implementation of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) which turns out to have uses beyond automated harvesting of metadata (e.g. The OpenURL Registry and the GSAFD Thesaurus).

In fact, these unconventional applications of OAI have led to the development of a new service called ERRoLs that decouples the extensions that were added to OAI for the OpenURL and GSAFD thesaurus and generalized them to work with any repository in the OAI Registry at UIUC.

JISC is working on an "Information Environment", a standardized set of ways to interchange information.

[In the future, Alice] begins to search for information about poverty for a social work assignment. Her search results return several possibilities including links to: a course reading list; books held in the college library; a digitised Victorian pamphlet about ‘the poor’; a list of websites for international charities concerned with poverty; articles in electronic journals; abstracts from a database; and e-prints in repositories at UK public sector institutions. ...

JISC is working to address this by developing tools and mechanisms to foster an online Information Environment (IE) that will allow online services to ‘work together’ (called interoperability) in a secure way for the benefit of its user community. The vision also includes enabling institutions to create, adapt and share content and incorporate it into their own services such as Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs).

What happens when you build services using layers of other services?  Outgoing describes

ERRoLs are built on top OAI-PMH registries.  In practice, we build our OAI registries in turn on top of SRU/SRW servers, so you can already see some protocol transformations happening.  Since OAI repositories have date stamps, that makes it fairly easy to turn them into RSS servers. ...

Jeff's latest twist on this whole thing: the MetaWiki which combines the ERRoL approach to metadata with Wiki editing and display.  More on that in a later post, as well as what Jeff's been working on the last few days--to extend ERRoLs to the latest OpenURL syntax(available now as ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004 here).

So that's how I see libraries working in the future: each library contributing to an information fabric, exposing its internal information as services to the broader community, integrating into the browsing experience of its users, and building "portals" that invite in users by bringing in the best of Web Services from all over the entire Internet in a combination that is appropriate for their user community.

Comments

[Alice Sneary]

Cheers Richard. Look forward to the holographic book theatre!

[Kevin Devine]

Ok, I was with you until you got to the end part. OAICat,OAI-PMH,GSAFD,VLEs,ERRoLs,JISC,ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004... What do these all mean? If we want to be able to bring the library to the masses, we need to escape from these terms. I work in a library and read a lot of library technology articles and they all throw these terms around like we all know what they mean... I liked the article until the end and then I glossed over... Laymen's terms, laymen's terms...