Reports on Libraries, Cloud Computing, and Better Mapping Tools

Unless you've been hiding in a cave for the last decade, you are acutely aware that the digital age has impacted nearly all personal and professional aspects of our lives. We find, research, buy, use, and share content of all kinds in completely new ways. Our libraries have also been affected, and two recent reports have examined these effects. One from consulting firm Outsell, Inc. looks at the library market worldwide. The other is the American Library As- sociation's (ALA) annual report, "The State of America's Libraries," for 2008.

Outsell, Inc. forecasts that libraries worldwide will spend $24.7 billion for content by 2010 (a 3.1% compound annual growth rate), according to its "2008 Library Market Size, Share & Forecast Report." The report - which Outsell says is the first to analyze the global market for all types of libraries, from traditional physical libraries to centralized information centers - has implications for publishers and librarians alike.

The report indicates that most content spending by libraries (21%) is going toward scientific and technical content. That's followed by educational information (11%), news (11%), and legal/tax/regulatory content (10%). The remainder is distributed among information types such as HR, marketing and IT research, and credit and other business information. While overall library investments are increasing, the proportional share devoted to most content segments is shrinking. The one exception is in education/training allocations, which have increased from 4% in 2004 to 11% in 2007. The report also notes the rise of user-generated and institutionally generated content that displaces commercially published content in many cases. Libraries of all varieties are now creating original content for their users.

The ALA report echoes the education emphasis of the Outsell findings. According to the report, libraries of all kinds continue to be "engines of learning, literacy, and economic development in communities nationwide." Americans are acting on their conviction that school library media centers are a key element in delivering the kind of education the next generation needs to succeed in a global society, and public libraries are redoubling their efforts to serve linguistically isolated communities. Americans check out more than 2 billion items each year from their public libraries, according to the report, and my local public library is buzzing with activity every time I visit. The full text of the report is available at www.ala.org/2008state.

Cloud Computing

One component of our digital age is a move toward "cloud computing." I'm simple terms, this means that instead of packaged software that we buy on CD and load onto our PC's, we'll be using a variety of applications in the "cloud" - the interest-and also storing our files and data there. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are examples of this. Google, Amazon, salesforce.cpm, and others all have successful SaaS offerings.

For more information, check out Erik Arnold's article in the May/June issue of ONLINE titled 'Leveraging Clouds to Make You More Efficient: How SaaS-y Are You?" Arnols says it's clear that "2008 will be the year for cloud computing, and everyone needs to understand and start planningn for yet another of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, says, "Cheap, utility-supplied computing as cheap electricity did."

Perhaps with this in mind, Google recently launched a preview release of Google App Engine, a way for developers to run their web applications on Google's infrastructure. With Google App Engine, developers can write web applications based on the same building blocks that Google uses, such as the Google File System (GFS) and BigTable (its distributed storage system for structured data).

Dion Hinchcliffe, a blogger at ZDNet, says, "Google's entry into a space that has been largely dominated so far by Amazon and its Elastic Compute Cloud - as well as a few smaller players such as Bungee and Heroku - has turned the internet cloud computing space into a fully fledged industry virtually overnight." We are grad- ually moving from just having applica- tions available over the web to offering an entire platform as a foundation to build applications.

In a move clearly meant to steal customers from Microsoft, salesforce.com announced a strategic agreement with Google. From within the salesforce customer relationship application (salesforce for Google Apps), companies can now embed Gmail, Google Docs (word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets), Google Talk (instant messaging), and Google Maps. All of this is delivered as a service on the web with no software to buy, download, or install. Rob Koplowitz of Forrester Research says both companies are "100% committed to cloud computing, and they think about the future of the industry in very similar terms." He also warns companies in the CRM (customer relationship management) space that "the disruption that can and will be caused by cloud computing is a potential source of risk and opportunity for every major player in the industry." (His comments are available at http://blogs.forrester.com/information_ management/2008/04/is-salesforce-t.html.) Of course, this spawned rumors of another acquisition - maybe Googleforce.com?

At press time, the LiveSide blog reported that Microsoft was expected to unveil Live Mesh, a new product that "combines a program installation on computers with a 'web desktop,' or cloud based storage, and will allow computers on the 'mesh' to synchronize folders among computers and to the cloud, share folders with others, and access computers on the mesh remotely from another computer or by accessing the 'web desktop' via the internet."

Work and Share

Microsoft also offers Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta as an online place to save, access, and share documents and files. It's a web-based extension to Microsoft Office and can be used for grouprelated information for work, school, or personal projects. It's free for now, and no downloads are required, but Microsoft reports it may offer additional fee-based features or services at some point. Schools such as the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington, and Vanderbilt University are now using the product. For colleges, Microsoft Live® edu provides a full suite of applications (mobile, desktop, and web-based) to help students collaborate on campus and create communities.

There's also a complementary service called Office Live Small Business, which provides services a small business needs to take its offerings online, including a professional website, domain name, company-branded emails, and online tools for managing customers and projects.

Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems is behind a project called Curriki, which is more "open" and focused specifically on educa- tion, initially K-12 curricula. It claims to be a free and truly open group collabora- tive solution for educational content cre- ation and sharing. It's "a community of educators, learners, and committed education experts who are working together to create quality materials that will benefit teachers and students around the world."

Etext Update

The Institute for the Future of the Book has made Sophie 1.0 available for download (www.sophieproject.org). Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents. It's an etext reader/ writer with multimedia and network ca- pabilities. The TeleRead blog (www.tele read.org/blog) has more information and delivered an interesting suggestion: "The library angle: Could public libraries of- fer Sophie classes and encourage pa- trons to create multimedia books on, say, local history"?

Search Engine Update

After scaling back its Ask.com search engine (see the NewsBreak at http://news breaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp ?ArticleId=41196) and preparing to restructure and spin off the older parts of its business, IAC (Inter ActiveCorp) is establishing portal sites targeted at specific communities of users: African -Americans, kids, news junkies, and personal finance types. Time will tell if IAC finds success with this new approach.

In addition, another startup search engine abandoned its general web search market and refocused exclusively on mobile phone users. Users of ChaCha can now ask questions by voice or by text messaging.

Meanwhile, Google has experimented for some months to reach further into websites with dynamic content that formerly would have remained inaccessible: the so-called invisible web or deep web. The Googlebot agent is now crawling through HTML forms for a select group of sites. This means that it generates text to fill in queries on sites with HTML forms (text boxes), and then crawls the results. (Sites blocked with a robots.txt file won't be accessed.) This could potentially have a huge impact on information content providers.

Search expert Danny Sullivan says Google is "not the first to do something like this. Companies like Quigo, BrightPlanet, and WhizBang Labs were doing this type of work years ago. But it never translated over to the major search engines. Now chapter two of surfacing deep web material is opening, this time with a major search player - in that, Google is being a pioneer."

Search guru Stephen Arnold has been studying how all these pieces of Google's technology fit together for years: the HTML forms, the App Engine, BigTable, and others. He says "The key point is that Google is putting something far larger in place, and it is interesting to me how the many gurus, SEO mavens, and Google observers nibble around the edges of the cookie as Google builds a giant digital confection factory. Scale is the problem. Google thinks big." Arnold will be taking a close look at all this in a column for KMWorld. You can also read his Beyond Search blog at http://arnoldit.com/ wordpress.

Map This

The mapping products from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft all continue to improve with more details, coverage, and features. I marvel over the satellite and aerial imagery and how much context it adds. Google's "street view" photos continue to amaze me (and worry some others) with their level of detail. Google also now lets business owners add YouTube videos to their listings on Google Maps.

Recently the Yahoo! Maps team announced "the single biggest imagery update on maps.yahoo.com since the program inception." The latest release improves breadth and depth of content, particularly for the U.S. Satellite images, which are in higher resolution and offer improvements "in freshness, color, and clarity."

Microsoft Live Search Maps introduced a new version that offers several new features, including neighborhood subscribe via GeoRSS, improved imagery, and traffic enhancements. Users who want directions can now opt to "choose route based on traffic." Several of these mapping services now let users send maps to their email, phone, or GPS unit.

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