ODI Conformance Statements

Speaker 1 It's six after, so I think we'll go ahead and get started. And I'm going to just give a really quick introduction here to Geoff Morse. He is the interim head of research services at the Northwestern University Libraries, and he is a member of the NISO Open Discovery Initiative Standing Committee, or otherwise known as the ODI Standing Committee. And if that doesn't ring a bell, then you're in luck, because that's exactly what Geoff is going to be talking about today. And without further ado, I will hand it over to you.

 

Speaker 2 Okay. Thank you, David. And one minute, we'll go into presentation mode here. Oh. All right. Now, I know I have to do one other tweak here. Apologies.

 

Speaker 2 Okay. We should all be seeing my presentation, but please let me know if we stop seeing it or if we're not seeing it right now.

 

Speaker 1 It looks like. Now it's switched over to the presentation view.

 

Speaker 2 Excellent. Okay. Well, thank you, David. I'm glad to be here. And today I'm going to going to talk about the NISO Open Discovery Initiative and what we call the ODI conformance statements. And I put and you, but I mean, really any libraries librarians. Today. So I'll I'll get started here. I have my and I'm not sure what just happened, but everything disappeared from my screen. So. Just a minute, please. All right. How's that? Are we back? Yet?

 

Speaker 3 Yes.

 

Speaker 1 Yes.

 

Speaker 2 Okay, great. Well, I was attempting to move to the next slide, so I will try that again. Here it is. This is my obligatory introduction slide, which doesn't have particularly a lot of information. That's me. Geoff Morse, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. I guess the most important thing here is that I started with the Open Discovery Initiative, a voluntary standing committee from NISO in 2018. And I will just continue on to the next slide. This is just an outline of what I'm going to talk about today. I thought it would be useful to give a very brief history and description of the Open Discovery Initiative or ODI and then talk about the value proposition. Basically, why should you be interested in this? What kind of what's in it for you? Why should you take the time to look at our recommended practice and perhaps do a conformance statement and look at a conformance checklist. So I will then talk about conformance statements and then conformance checklists, which really are what the conformance statements are based on. And I'll wrap things up with a conclusion, and we'll have a chance to look at at least a conformance checklist and statement that I was involved in at Northwestern here. And we can have discussion if there is is any discussion or questions as well. So that's what I hope to have happen. And I hope by the end of our presentation today, you at least have an idea, a pretty good idea of the basics of open discovery and why we're why we're pushing it, why we're doing it. So I have one more kind of introductory slide, which is some key terms. And I know you may not, this may not be necessary, but I found myself in practice when I was getting ready for this, I kept on I was saying NISO and ODI a lot. So I just want to make sure that everyone knows. NISO when I say that it's the National Information Standards Organization, which is a nonprofit to quote their website, identifies, develops, maintains and publishes technical standards and recommended practices to manage information. And we're talking about the ODI as a recommended practice. When I say content provider, I'm basically talking about somebody who disseminates some...disseminates information data into that database, the big aggregated database that discovery providers have. So I'm talking about it could be APA, it could be Springer. It could be Nature. It could be. Oh, let me think of one more: Clarivate Web of Science and hundreds more. So that's what I mean when I say content provider. And I'm sure I probably didn't need to put what I meant by discovery service provider, but I will say the Open Discovery Initiative Committee, we're basically talking about the four discovery providers in the academic library universe, which, as you probably or may know, is ProQuest Ex Libris Primo, ProQuest Ex Libris Summon. OCLC's WorldShare. Oh wait. Not WorldShare. I can't remember exactly the product name and EBSCO's EDS. I'm familiar most with Primo because Northwestern has been an Ex Libris Primo customer for a number of years. So those are my key terms. And now I will kind of dove into the Open Discovery Initiative, what it is background and then the current recommended practice document.

 

Speaker 2 So. The Open Discovery Initiative really has its origins in 2011 at a pre-meeting prior to the American Library Association conference, in New Orleans that year. And basically senior industry managers, people from Ex Libris, OCLC, EBSCO, Summon, met with library leaders and to discuss these new new discovery systems and their kind of areas of mutual interest in terms of these library discovery systems. So in 2011, at this time that the discovery systems, particularly with these big aggregated indexes of content like at the time, was called Primo Central. It's now called Central Discovery Index. And and the other discovery providers, some in EBSCO, OCLC also were providing these big aggregated indexes of content. At the time there wasn't. Well, they were relatively new and they, as you probably know, usually had a single search box or configured kind of for that one stop shopping Google idea. And they it was obviously at that time these new tools had a potential to have a really large impact on the way librarians and researchers search for and located information. And I think it's safe to say they have had an impact. However, also at this time, there wasn't a lot of transparency regarding exactly what was being indexed in these big databases or how conformant some of the content coming in to these databases and central discovery indexes and appearing in discovery systems, how conformant it was with kind of the expectations of standards of librarians. So as a result of this meeting, a proposal for a new working group was made to NISO and the new ODI working group began its work in 2012 and, really the first order of business for this new group was to create, a best a best practices document, which eventually evolved into the first iteration of our ODI recommended practices document, which was released in 2014. So initially, I wasn't part of that group at this point back in 2012. But the the new group started by surveying librarians, content providers and discovery providers to kind of gauge their level of satisfaction with these new tools and their concerns. And they actually had 871 responses, which is really good. Most were from librarians, but there were also content providers and discovery service provider representatives who participated. And the results of the survey anyway drove this first iteration of the recommended practice document. So very quickly, I won't go into great amount of detail here. There were some of the the main points of interest in the first document were things like technical recommendations for data format and data transfer, which of course was important for the way content providers would get their data to discovery providers. And it was also important in the rate of how often this material was was updated. There was also concerns and questions about what specific metadata was being added to these indexes, how complete it was and. Let's see what else. Well, there was related to that. There were recommendations for better communication with libraries in terms of what what was encompassed in these databases. There were recommendations for descriptors regarding the level of indexing performed for each individual collection that was going into these big aggregated indexes. And. Finally and I went really fast and probably skipped over some stuff. But another really important aspect of this was about statistics, dissemination of what usage statistics should be collected for whom and how the data should be disseminated. So content providers obviously had a need for how much information and how much their content was being used through discovery providers and of course, librarians. Libraries certainly wanted to see statistics on how many searches, unique visitors, click thrus, that sort of thing. So that was the first the initial the initial document which included at the end of it a kind of checklist for discovery service providers and content providers to go through and see how, how quote unquote conformant they were with the NISO recommended practices. And they could then poster send a link to NISO to post their conformance statement stating, you know, just how conformant they were with the recommended practices, whether it was statistics or and whether it was a content provider talking about how their data was transferred or other or how much of their collections were were in the discovery providers or how transparent they were about what was in there, or discovery provider talking about what what statistics they had or but they could basically they could publish a statement saying how conformant they were. And importantly, reiterate this again, there was perfection wasn't the goal. It was just trying to see where everyone was and hopefully they're making an effort to become more conformant. So anyway, that was the initial the initial document. What I'm mostly going to be focusing on today is the revision of the recommended practice document that was released in 2020, almost two years ago now. So the big change in the new document, in addition to too many of the items I've just pointed out, a big change was a heavier emphasis on the library responsibilities and Open Discovery Initiative. So. Because really it was obviously it's important that libraries follow certain practices in terms of configuration and how they operate their discovery systems for the the optimum performance. And this is again where I'll be focusing more today. Other things in the new document include more information on recommendations for handling open access content for discovery providers and content providers, access and license indicators, how those are indicated against usage statistics. Concerns about fair linking in a nutshell, basically that libraries should have the ability to choose which links to content if they're multiple links. Some of these concerns started when discovery providers also have become content providers in some cases. So there's some emphasis on the recommended practice of making sure that discovery providers provide statements of neutrality and that sort of thing. Other things, identifying a source of record and discovery interface and content coverage disclosure. So that. That. And again, the identification by content providers of what metadata elements they're sending to the discovery provider. So that was kind of the. The. A quick summary of the current document and what I'll do right now. I'm not I'm going to, I'm going to try to just quickly show you the recommended practice document, although I'm not sure how this is going to work, be...But because I'm not familiar with WebEx, but I'll give it a shot. So just bear with me one second. Um. And. Uh oh.

 

Speaker 2 Okay. You should now be seeing the Open Discovery Initiative document. Are you seeing that?

 

Speaker 3 Yes.

 

Speaker 2 Excellent. Okay. I'm not going to spend a lot of time. It's really long. And I. I honestly, I'm not sure how helpful this will be, but I just wanted to show you kind of what I was talking about. So the document here has a purpose in the scope and it has kind of a nice evolution, history of discovery and delivery. But we really get down to the recommendations in the third section. And you can see, you know, there's a section on best practices for content, discovery and then libraries again, which is where I spend most of my time. I'm going to click on libraries to get right there and it has some of the stuff that you might expect, individuals designated for configuring discovery services, links, etc.. And if you can bear with me, I'm going to very quickly scroll, which may not be the most pleasant visual. But let me. I'm going to get right to the end because I want to. Yeah. I passed. Well, let's see. Perhaps they won't find it quickly. I just wanted to show you. And these are our appendices. And our. Questions. I was going to show you the checklist, which I can show you later. I was going to just quickly show you now. Ah. Here we go! Sorry about that. So here's the library checklist. So basically, this is what I'll be talking about today. It's just a checklist where you can indicate whether you meet the recommendation or are partially there or are not able to meet it and there's a place for comments. So that's that's basically what I'm referring to. So now I am going to attempt to go back to the PowerPoint, which some which will be. All right. All right. And. Let's see. And I'm going to just quickly get it going again. And I will. Okay. And I'll just. Great. We're back where we were. Fantastic. I assume everyone can see the PowerPoint again.

 

Speaker 3 We are good to go.

 

Speaker 2 Excellent. Okay, so that was kind of the quick background of ODI and what it is. And of course, I'll be able to answer. Well, hopefully I'll be able to answer more questions at the end, if that's not entirely clear. Um, so here's the, the kind of what's in it for me, value propositions. So, and I, I know probably most of you are most interested in what's in it for libraries, but I'll quickly point out that for. For content providers. You know, clearly participating in discovery systems will increase their visibility of content, which hopefully for them will in turn prevent, prevent cancelations. So really there's and there is a content provider checklist kind of meeting the standards for optimal performance and discovery systems I think clearly is a benefit benefit for content providers. For discovery providers, you know, the increasing transparency will improve customer satisfaction, customers being of course end users most important, but also it's really important for librarians and libraries to know exactly what's being searched, that all the content is being searched correctly or searched, I don't know if searched correctly is the right thing to to say. And then for libraries, I think, which is mostly what what again, I'm talking about today, it's really important to make sure that your discovery system is exposing all the content it should be to make this sort of what generally is the goal of all in one searching or one stop shopping work effectively and the Open Discovery Initiative and doing the checklist will make it easier kind of to understand how well your system's working and identify gaps where maybe there's room for improvement. So. As I move on. This is just we use this graphic a lot. So basically it shows the three kind of big stakeholder groups and the understanding that we're all kind of in this together and what a discovery provider does can have an impact on content providers and libraries. And the same with libraries. What we do can have an impact on content providers if perhaps we're not configuring something correctly and the content is not being used as much, there are lower usage stats, etc. So that the main thing is we're we're kind of all in this together. It's a cooperative. Cooperative. Operations, so to speak. The Open Discovery Committee has representatives from libraries and the discovery providers and content providers. And it's just important. That it's all built on kind of cooperation. So. Conformance statements. Why? Why would you want to put out a statement saying that, you know, you're your. I don't know 80-90% conformant with an ODI recommended recommended practice. Well, here are some basic, basic possibilities. They they kind of show one show the world you're doing your best to be conformant with the recommended practice. Completing a conformance statement goes a long way to showing transparency and facilitates some communication and a conformance statement, which I hope we'll see in a minute. Can can provide a reader kind of a quick overview of where your organization is in terms of the recommended practice. So. All of those. All of those are, I think, pretty good reasons why you might want to complete a conformance statement. And if I move move along here, the conformance checklist. So I don't know how helpful the screenshots were, but they take up some real estate anyway. These are the three kind of screenshots of the three different conformance conformance checklists, and after I stopped sharing my presentation at the end, I can drop into chat all the links to the different checklists and the documentation as well. Sorry I didn't do that at the beginning, but things I really want to stress, one, that being conformant, we kind of say it's an iterative process. It's not like you fill out a conformance checklist and you're done. You're conformit or you're not. Things change and things, things grow. Discovery systems are works in progress. As I said, that checklist can help you kind of identify areas to fill in and work on. And we always say in just about every presentation I've been involved in, that perfect is the enemy of good just meaning that we don't expect anyone to do conformance statement that's 100% perfect. I know certainly my libraries is not one. My library does not have 100% perfection at all. What what we're just hoping for is people review this and start doing the checklist and updating them and updating their conformance statements as they go along. And I will show you examples of the conformance checklist and statement in a couple minutes. So. And again, remember, you can always you can always update a conformance conformance checklist. So. As I said earlier, the process of completing the checklist it says here facilitates communication and understanding workflow and staff role. So I want to digress for a second. In early 2019, when the Open Discovery Initiative Committee was starting to work on the revision of the recommended practice or kind of in the middle of it, actually. We did another survey and this one was just of libraries regarding their discovery implementations. The result of this survey made it clear a few things clear. Some of them, I'm sure, are not not surprising, but one of them. First off, it made it clear that in many cases the implementation of discovery systems really fell primarily to one staff member. And anyone who's worked in a smaller library and I have worked in a smaller library in the past. Won't really be surprised by that, I don't think. But another thing we found out. Was that quite a number of times the respondents would say, well, the person who implemented or configured our discovery system has since moved on to another job. And I don't really know how to do this. They didn't leave documentation or something, so. Some of that information was used. You'll see in the conformance checklist where we have conformance best practices for maintaining documentation and assigning individuals for specific tasks. So but the conformance checklist for the libraries focuses on responsibility of the libraries to kind of just configure the discovery system to optimal performance. So as I think everyone knows, the discovery system is not going to configure itself, of course, but we try to get at, you know, certainly the discovery providers have a big responsibility to provide us with products that that work and content providers have responsibilities, but so do libraries as well. And we one of our responsibilities is to make sure that. That it's working correctly. And if it's not. Take steps to to. That could be working with the discovery provider or content provider to correct correct problems. So. Anyway. Covered in this checklist are areas such as staff roles and documentation and collaboration and at my home institution of Northwestern. The process of doing the conformance checklists really did help improve some mutual understanding among library staff of what others are working on. We're a large enough organization that we have a number of people working in different areas. So for instance, understanding of all the staff has different staff assignments in relation to the discovery system is clearly very important. And while we didn't change any work assignments, it became clear who is taking responsibility in certain areas for certain things. This is important, particularly in terms of problem solving and it really improves some cross team communication and. And was very, very helpful in identifying some other other things we needed to improve. So. For instance, tracking down the correct location for a role can be a challenge in a really large distributed organization, and not everyone knowing what everyone else is doing can help the sort of cross team communication helped everyone get a better idea. So I kind of repeated myself there. But for instance, our we have what we call a Primo team for our discovery system, and we're really more aware of some of the major work our electronic resources librarians do and activating and selecting databases and collections and some of the problems they sometimes run into. So that's been really productive. Library staff in the Primo team and as a whole lot better informed about who to contact with with specific problems. So and I think I forgot to forward my my slides. So just a second. Oh, no, I didn't. I went too far. Oh, no, I'm previewing the next screen. But anyway, I'll just keep talking. I was mostly done. So. It's been really helpful to convene that group from across the libraries, to have this kind of discussion on configuration options that I think the checklist really, really helped with. So here is I just took some screenshots of some just a few examples from the library checklist. This is our Northwestern's one and this these are a couple ones that were pretty easy for us to answer. We have individuals designated to be responsible for Discovery Service, Link Resolver, or proxy, etc. We have ranking and authentication options available for subscribed content. So that's that's all good. That's just an example of the checklist that I'm going to move on to places where we needed some work, for instance, this was our electronic resources. People put some of these comments in. So we work with vendors to create detailed agreements. Well, we don't completely only sometimes build their content and we do happen sometimes with new content. So we check and evaluate ODI conformance statements. We really only do this necessary to problem solve or setup. So that's a couple examples of things we maybe could improve on and continuing. Things like, well, I didn't put. We also need to improve our documentation, although we're working on it. So in case people leave, there'll still be record and documentation of how we did things but also place we really need to do some work as execute some staff training program for staff, working with the Discovery Service, Link Resolver, etc. And we also probably could do some more training sessions for public as well. Now I know, you know, the discovery system is supposed to be intuitive, but we found that sometimes some training sessions can be beneficial at times. So those were just a couple examples of how we we have some, some work to do and how it's kind of helped us. You know, now we can maybe get our heads around. Well, we really do need to do a certain number of training sessions. So we really do need to do some more documentation to describe not only how but why. Because I've had examples where people are like, Well, why did we do that? You know, why did we put, I don't know, a table of contents here on the record? Why isn't it up there that came up yesterday and it would be good to have some record of there was that was just a happy accident or if there was a reason for that so.

 

Speaker 2 So again, here I kind of talked about this earlier. I guess I got a little out of order, but the regular meetings on configuration have helped understanding better about what our electronic resources folks do with activation of various databases and getting more in touch with the official documentation. Now, we've all used some of it over the years, but I think we have a better idea where we're really paying better attention as well. So the library checklist has really helped us help us with that and. If I move out here, I've linked some completed conformance statements as well. So why don't I just jump right to libraries here? And let's see. Just a second I'm going to have to share something else here. Just one minute, please. Here we go. And. Oh. Nope. Apologies. Just one second. Here we go. So you should see my completed conformance statements page, and you can go to one of these. I'll go to the our example here. And so if you're at a at a library, we we'd really love to have some more completed conformance statements. But anyway, I'm going to go to Northwestern and this is our page here about what what is the Open Discovery Initiative? And why do libraries commit to open discovery, encourage this transparency cooperation? And then we have a link, a link right out to our our document, which anyone can look at. And you can go down through it and you would documentation being improved, we haven't documented all decisions. So we have a lot of yeses, but we have some things to work on. And we had one hard no, which honestly was kind of a hard ask. It's not that we can't ever do it. Advocates increasing ODI conformance for content providers and discovery service providers. This is the sort of thing I might do. We don't regularly do it, which is why it got a no. In fact, I think we've hardly ever done it, but it would be a good thing. When I when sales people contact me with their latest updates or upgrades or new databases it would be a good thing to bring up. We put a no because honestly, we couldn't say that we'd actually done that yet. It would be nice to at least to get that to a P just you know, when you're talking to a content provider or our discovery provider, how is your conformance coming? Have you are you aware of this? So. These are. We have some comments here. And then that stuff, that's kind of the end of it. So that's our specific. Specific conformance statement which is really honestly is based on the checklist. You can be as visit some of the other libraries here and then we can if we go back to the ODI page. And I'll go to conformance statements. And again, I'll pass along all those links to you. You can see the discovery providers or you can see the the checklist here. So you can see what the content providers have to do and the discovery providers, these are actually will be downloaded as word documents. But if we go, we can see which content providers so far and there are a few APA, IEEE, Oxford, ProQuest and Springer. We're always looking for more and discovery providers. We have experts in OCLC so far. Again, we expect we'll get EBSCO in there. We we have representatives on the open discovery committee of all of the different, different big discovery providers. And I should. Before I. I feel I should have done this earlier. I'm going to go back to our document for a second because I just. Sorry about the scrolling. I'm going to go to the. Are that near the top and I'm probably in the wrong place. Okay. Let's see. And we have. I'm looking for. I just wanted to show you the list of the members of the committee there. Oh, here is the working group. This is the original minute. Here we go. This is our current. These are great people to work with. And these are. Some of our reps. It's a people rotate on and off of the committee, but we have representatives from a wide variety and they all worked really hard on putting together this some this particular document. So. Here. I will go back to my PowerPoint presentation. And. And I'm going to move forward one more time.

 

Speaker 2 So here in the conclusion, I just we're really urging people to look at the recommended practice document and complete publishing conformance statement, which would be great. But again, I want to emphasize, it certainly doesn't have to be perfect just to show you're kind of working on this, I think will be super and I think you'll feel that benefits, too. And there's, you know, no time rush. You can take a few months to complete it. Some people have or you can do it really quickly and you can always bring up ODI conformance with any vendors just to see what they have to say. This is a link right out to the Open Discovery Open Discovery website, which I can go to in a minute. And then here's my obligatory last slide, the Thank you! Questions? But I'm really kind of excited about this. I think it's really been helpful for me. And as for our library to be part of the Open Discovery Initiative, and I think this promoting of transparency is something that is really helpful to me as a librarian when I'm on the public services desk to be able to know a little bit more about what's in our discovery system, because honestly, that's what a lot of our students are using. We have a single search box on the web page that where most of them go to. We have options where you can narrow down to just the catalog or other things. And our advanced searchers certainly use the individual databases, but a lot of our students are using the discovery. So I think it's really important that we were taking part in this and. Well, that's my, that's my basic introduction to ODI and I'd be really happy to answer any questions now or, or in the future. And I will also in the chat in a minute I'll include some links and the Open Discovery Initiative email as well, which you can check.

 

Speaker 1 So Geoff I have posted some of the links into chat there, although I may not have included everything that you were intending to share, so you might want to maybe toss some extra links in there if you have them. For everyone who's on the call, if you have any questions, by all means go ahead and place them in the chat and we'll start reading through those. Or if you want to unmute yourselves and ask a question, you're more than welcome to do that too. I thought that well, first of all, I want to say thank you. I think that was an excellent presentation. I know that I have been working with discovery leaders, you know, for many years. But, you know, I had not yet stumbled upon ODI and conformance statements until earlier this year. And I suspect that, you know, the conformance statements are also very new to many, if not most of us in the crowd today as well. So thank you for sort of giving us giving us an introduction to them.

 

Speaker 2 My pleasure.

 

Speaker 1 That's and another thing I definitely want to thank you for pointing out is the and I think iterated a few times was perfection is not the goal here. And that makes, I think, us feel better certainly makes me feel better that the purpose of the conformance statement is not to get something perfect, but rather just to help you do your due diligence, which I think many of us, especially librarians, I mean, come on, let's all admit it. We love our checklists. We love our checklists. Then it helps us to do our due diligence. And I know that if I were responsible for something like a discovery layer, it's nice to have a resource like this. And so that's I think we had a few questions. Come in here. Let's see what we got. Can you repeat the goals of the library checklist? I believe the first goal was regular meetings on configuration.

 

Speaker 2 Oh, sure. So that really the the goals of the checklist. Ah that was definitely one of them. But basically I think overall most of them revolve around configuration and making sure that the configuration is is correct and that you're doing your documenting your decisions and that you're doing you're kind of taking some steps to make sure both your staff and your library, public, library, public, your patrons, your constituency also have training opportunities if, if wanted. So, um, and I should point out that this was a big, um, a big addition to the, um. This iteration of the recommended practice document. So those were kind of some of the some of the goals, really. That's what some of them that's what the the goals of the library checklist kind of revolve around specifically. Thanks for the question.

 

Speaker 1 And Jim. Jim, maybe you could on your mark to ask your question, because I'm sort of reading through it, but I'm not entirely sure if I if I'm capturing it right here, sir. It sounds like you're asking about some sort of a benchmark for the vendors to measure against. Is that right? For example, sites hit their Primo, EDS, Summon, all search "higgs boson" send the first top 100 results then scored on how each of them did. So it sounds like you're trying to like compare discovery services against each other there too. Is that right?

 

Speaker 2 I'm looking at it too.

 

Speaker 1 And maybe Jim's not able to unmute himself, so we'll give him a moment to maybe add something to the chat. While we're waiting on that, though, I did want to ask one question about the recommended best practices, or I think they just call it the recommended practices, whatever it was called. So it sounded like the first version of that came out in 2014. And then there was a revised one that came out. Yes, 2020. Is there is there a sort of a goal for the committee to regularly revise these? Or is there sort of like a plan for the future for these conformance statements, you know, updating the checklists or implementing feedback?

 

Speaker 2 There's not a a specific timeline to re to issue a new recommended practice document, but I think by the nature of it will have to the committee will continually have to update every 4-5, six years. But no, we don't have specific, set in stone. We will re, you know, reissue the document every certain amount of time, but just the nature of the work. Right now we're. We're doing more in terms of kind of promoting and outreach and things like that. But there are always some I think there'll always be a need to kind of revise and. Again. But for the time being, I think it's safe to say for the next probably three years at least, this is the document. Right now.

 

Speaker 1 And Jim has added here is like daily Wordle comes out each day, you don't know till that day, so quarterly shock search count no vendor prep. It's sort of like a surprise check in Jim that's what it sounds like you're saying.

 

Speaker 2 Yeah that's kind of interesting. That would be actually really interesting I think to do that compare now.

 

Speaker 1 I think one of the problems you'll run into there, though, is in order for it to be a fair comparison. I mean, again, we would, you'd almost up to ensure that the discovery layers are configured identically in a way, but I don't even know if that's possible during configurations between Summon to say EBSCO, might be sort of very different.

 

Speaker 2 Yeah, because some of the the content is all not going to be exactly, exactly the same in each discovery system. Like certain metadata providers may not provide it to each discovery system for whatever reason. But still, it's an intriguing idea, actually.

 

Speaker 1 Yeah, I agree. It is intriguing. Jim you hold on to that idea. Maybe we can make something of it one day. And we have a question here from Derek. As far as setting a focus for institutions with limited staff, are there any recommendations for specific checklist targets for smaller libraries? So maybe like targeting a subset of the checklist Derek, is that maybe what you're suggesting?

 

Speaker 2 That's a good question.

 

Speaker 2 We didn't specifically talk about that, but it's a really. You know mostly we focused on just do whatever, whatever you can do. But that's a good question because my first library job was really small academic library, so I can kind of appreciate that. I would. Hmm. I'd have to look at that to be really honest and see if there are specific things that should be should be focused on first, maybe. And this is just me, not the committee. So I could be incorrect here, but maybe, you know, certain things like making sure the correct database collections are available seems to me to be a top priority. Maybe making sure the upgrades are run. I mean, our vendor now Ex Libris, since we're in the cloud, runs the upgrades for us. So that used to be a much bigger deal. We'd have to like schedule an upgrade and that was some oh that could be painful, but it's really seamless now. So I'm sorry, I don't have a better answer than that, but I would start with, you know, making sure all the content is appearing as it should. And, you know, if it's not working with the discovery provider because they should help you with that. So. Yeah.

 

Speaker 1 And for what it's worth, I know, I think on one of your slides you were showing the discovery providers who have published a conformance statement and you mentioned you hope to get one from EBSCO soon. If I recall correctly, I do kind of I think I remember seeing them having published something on their website somewhere when I was sort of kicking around. But I don't know if maybe it wasn't official yet or they just haven't, you know, asked to be included on that list. But since I mentioned that because most of us are an EBSCO crowd here, so if anyone's curious, I think if you do sort of Google a, you know, the phrase EBSCO and conformance statement, I think you should be able to find EBSCO's. I know that for my part it was interesting to begin reading through their conformance checklist to see what they put because I felt that at times I didn't always agree with what they put. Have you ever had that sort of come up before? 

 

Speaker 2 Well, yeah. I think if there is something that you don't agree, I think it's out of transparency. It it's perfectly acceptable to maybe email your reps, go up and say, hey, I need some more information because you said, you know, you do this, but I haven't seen evidence of it, are we? And you could phrase it like, are we not doing something right? Or that might be how I would. So, you know, not to make them defensive or anything, although you're the customer, so.

 

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Richard and Cathy for posting that. Yeah, that's what I had come across before. So it is kind of interesting to sort of read what they have published against your own experience. But you know, more to your point, Geoff, I mean, that's a perfect way to sort of, you know, facilitate that communication between you and the content provider or the discovery provider. And just like, hey, let's talk about the specific recommended best practice and.

 

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I will on my we have an ODI meeting this Friday so I will ask our EBSCO rep if they can get the link up on the site because that would be helpful to. But thanks for putting that in the chat.

 

Speaker 1 All right. Are there any more questions from the crowd?

 

Speaker 2 I put my email in the chat and I put the ODI email in there as well and you can email me at any time. If you have questions about this or anything, that would be fantastic. I appreciate you taking the time to listen to me talk about this.

 

Speaker 1 I appreciate you coming today and talking about it for us. I hope this was helpful to everybody. And thanks again to everybody for turning out and have a great day, everyone.

 

Speaker 2 Okay. And if you do have questions, don't hesitate to follow up with me. Seriously. Happy to hear from anyone. So have a good day.

 

Speaker 1 Thank you.

OhioLINK E-Resources Community of Interest WebEx-20220504 1729-1.mp4

 

Speaker 1 It's six after, so I think we'll go ahead and get started. And I'm going to just give a really quick introduction here to Geoff Morse. He is the interim head of research services at the Northwestern University Libraries, and he is a member of the NISO Open Discovery Initiative Standing Committee, or otherwise known as the ODI Standing Committee. And if that doesn't ring a bell, then you're in luck, because that's exactly what Geoff is going to be talking about today. And without further ado, I will hand it over to you.

 

Speaker 2 Okay. Thank you, David. And one minute, we'll go into presentation mode here. Oh. All right. Now, I know I have to do one other tweak here. Apologies.

 

Speaker 2 Okay. We should all be seeing my presentation, but please let me know if we stop seeing it or if we're not seeing it right now.

 

Speaker 1 It looks like. Now it's switched over to the presentation view.

 

Speaker 2 Excellent. Okay. Well, thank you, David. I'm glad to be here. And today I'm going to going to talk about the NISO Open Discovery Initiative and what we call the ODI conformance statements. And I put and you, but I mean, really any libraries librarians. Today. So I'll I'll get started here. I have my and I'm not sure what just happened, but everything disappeared from my screen. So. Just a minute, please. All right. How's that? Are we back? Yet?

 

Speaker 3 Yes.

 

Speaker 1 Yes.

 

Speaker 2 Okay, great. Well, I was attempting to move to the next slide, so I will try that again. Here it is. This is my obligatory introduction slide, which doesn't have particularly a lot of information. That's me. Geoff Morse, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. I guess the most important thing here is that I started with the Open Discovery Initiative, a voluntary standing committee from NISO in 2018. And I will just continue on to the next slide. This is just an outline of what I'm going to talk about today. I thought it would be useful to give a very brief history and description of the Open Discovery Initiative or ODI and then talk about the value proposition. Basically, why should you be interested in this? What kind of what's in it for you? Why should you take the time to look at our recommended practice and perhaps do a conformance statement and look at a conformance checklist. So I will then talk about conformance statements and then conformance checklists, which really are what the conformance statements are based on. And I'll wrap things up with a conclusion, and we'll have a chance to look at at least a conformance checklist and statement that I was involved in at Northwestern here. And we can have discussion if there is is any discussion or questions as well. So that's what I hope to have happen. And I hope by the end of our presentation today, you at least have an idea, a pretty good idea of the basics of open discovery and why we're why we're pushing it, why we're doing it. So I have one more kind of introductory slide, which is some key terms. And I know you may not, this may not be necessary, but I found myself in practice when I was getting ready for this, I kept on I was saying NISO and ODI a lot. So I just want to make sure that everyone knows. NISO when I say that it's the National Information Standards Organization, which is a nonprofit to quote their website, identifies, develops, maintains and publishes technical standards and recommended practices to manage information. And we're talking about the ODI as a recommended practice. When I say content provider, I'm basically talking about somebody who disseminates some...disseminates information data into that database, the big aggregated database that discovery providers have. So I'm talking about it could be APA, it could be Springer. It could be Nature. It could be. Oh, let me think of one more: Clarivate Web of Science and hundreds more. So that's what I mean when I say content provider. And I'm sure I probably didn't need to put what I meant by discovery service provider, but I will say the Open Discovery Initiative Committee, we're basically talking about the four discovery providers in the academic library universe, which, as you probably or may know, is ProQuest Ex Libris Primo, ProQuest Ex Libris Summon. OCLC's WorldShare. Oh wait. Not WorldShare. I can't remember exactly the product name and EBSCO's EDS. I'm familiar most with Primo because Northwestern has been an Ex Libris Primo customer for a number of years. So those are my key terms. And now I will kind of dove into the Open Discovery Initiative, what it is background and then the current recommended practice document.

 

Speaker 2 So. The Open Discovery Initiative really has its origins in 2011 at a pre-meeting prior to the American Library Association conference, in New Orleans that year. And basically senior industry managers, people from Ex Libris, OCLC, EBSCO, Summon, met with library leaders and to discuss these new new discovery systems and their kind of areas of mutual interest in terms of these library discovery systems. So in 2011, at this time that the discovery systems, particularly with these big aggregated indexes of content like at the time, was called Primo Central. It's now called Central Discovery Index. And and the other discovery providers, some in EBSCO, OCLC also were providing these big aggregated indexes of content. At the time there wasn't. Well, they were relatively new and they, as you probably know, usually had a single search box or configured kind of for that one stop shopping Google idea. And they it was obviously at that time these new tools had a potential to have a really large impact on the way librarians and researchers search for and located information. And I think it's safe to say they have had an impact. However, also at this time, there wasn't a lot of transparency regarding exactly what was being indexed in these big databases or how conformant some of the content coming in to these databases and central discovery indexes and appearing in discovery systems, how conformant it was with kind of the expectations of standards of librarians. So as a result of this meeting, a proposal for a new working group was made to NISO and the new ODI working group began its work in 2012 and, really the first order of business for this new group was to create, a best a best practices document, which eventually evolved into the first iteration of our ODI recommended practices document, which was released in 2014. So initially, I wasn't part of that group at this point back in 2012. But the the new group started by surveying librarians, content providers and discovery providers to kind of gauge their level of satisfaction with these new tools and their concerns. And they actually had 871 responses, which is really good. Most were from librarians, but there were also content providers and discovery service provider representatives who participated. And the results of the survey anyway drove this first iteration of the recommended practice document. So very quickly, I won't go into great amount of detail here. There were some of the the main points of interest in the first document were things like technical recommendations for data format and data transfer, which of course was important for the way content providers would get their data to discovery providers. And it was also important in the rate of how often this material was was updated. There was also concerns and questions about what specific metadata was being added to these indexes, how complete it was and. Let's see what else. Well, there was related to that. There were recommendations for better communication with libraries in terms of what what was encompassed in these databases. There were recommendations for descriptors regarding the level of indexing performed for each individual collection that was going into these big aggregated indexes. And. Finally and I went really fast and probably skipped over some stuff. But another really important aspect of this was about statistics, dissemination of what usage statistics should be collected for whom and how the data should be disseminated. So content providers obviously had a need for how much information and how much their content was being used through discovery providers and of course, librarians. Libraries certainly wanted to see statistics on how many searches, unique visitors, click thrus, that sort of thing. So that was the first the initial the initial document which included at the end of it a kind of checklist for discovery service providers and content providers to go through and see how, how quote unquote conformant they were with the NISO recommended practices. And they could then poster send a link to NISO to post their conformance statement stating, you know, just how conformant they were with the recommended practices, whether it was statistics or and whether it was a content provider talking about how their data was transferred or other or how much of their collections were were in the discovery providers or how transparent they were about what was in there, or discovery provider talking about what what statistics they had or but they could basically they could publish a statement saying how conformant they were. And importantly, reiterate this again, there was perfection wasn't the goal. It was just trying to see where everyone was and hopefully they're making an effort to become more conformant. So anyway, that was the initial the initial document. What I'm mostly going to be focusing on today is the revision of the recommended practice document that was released in 2020, almost two years ago now. So the big change in the new document, in addition to too many of the items I've just pointed out, a big change was a heavier emphasis on the library responsibilities and Open Discovery Initiative. So. Because really it was obviously it's important that libraries follow certain practices in terms of configuration and how they operate their discovery systems for the the optimum performance. And this is again where I'll be focusing more today. Other things in the new document include more information on recommendations for handling open access content for discovery providers and content providers, access and license indicators, how those are indicated against usage statistics. Concerns about fair linking in a nutshell, basically that libraries should have the ability to choose which links to content if they're multiple links. Some of these concerns started when discovery providers also have become content providers in some cases. So there's some emphasis on the recommended practice of making sure that discovery providers provide statements of neutrality and that sort of thing. Other things, identifying a source of record and discovery interface and content coverage disclosure. So that. That. And again, the identification by content providers of what metadata elements they're sending to the discovery provider. So that was kind of the. The. A quick summary of the current document and what I'll do right now. I'm not I'm going to, I'm going to try to just quickly show you the recommended practice document, although I'm not sure how this is going to work, be...But because I'm not familiar with WebEx, but I'll give it a shot. So just bear with me one second. Um. And. Uh oh.

 

Speaker 2 Okay. You should now be seeing the Open Discovery Initiative document. Are you seeing that?

 

Speaker 3 Yes.

 

Speaker 2 Excellent. Okay. I'm not going to spend a lot of time. It's really long. And I. I honestly, I'm not sure how helpful this will be, but I just wanted to show you kind of what I was talking about. So the document here has a purpose in the scope and it has kind of a nice evolution, history of discovery and delivery. But we really get down to the recommendations in the third section. And you can see, you know, there's a section on best practices for content, discovery and then libraries again, which is where I spend most of my time. I'm going to click on libraries to get right there and it has some of the stuff that you might expect, individuals designated for configuring discovery services, links, etc.. And if you can bear with me, I'm going to very quickly scroll, which may not be the most pleasant visual. But let me. I'm going to get right to the end because I want to. Yeah. I passed. Well, let's see. Perhaps they won't find it quickly. I just wanted to show you. And these are our appendices. And our. Questions. I was going to show you the checklist, which I can show you later. I was going to just quickly show you now. Ah. Here we go! Sorry about that. So here's the library checklist. So basically, this is what I'll be talking about today. It's just a checklist where you can indicate whether you meet the recommendation or are partially there or are not able to meet it and there's a place for comments. So that's that's basically what I'm referring to. So now I am going to attempt to go back to the PowerPoint, which some which will be. All right. All right. And. Let's see. And I'm going to just quickly get it going again. And I will. Okay. And I'll just. Great. We're back where we were. Fantastic. I assume everyone can see the PowerPoint again.

 

Speaker 3 We are good to go.

 

Speaker 2 Excellent. Okay, so that was kind of the quick background of ODI and what it is. And of course, I'll be able to answer. Well, hopefully I'll be able to answer more questions at the end, if that's not entirely clear. Um, so here's the, the kind of what's in it for me, value propositions. So, and I, I know probably most of you are most interested in what's in it for libraries, but I'll quickly point out that for. For content providers. You know, clearly participating in discovery systems will increase their visibility of content, which hopefully for them will in turn prevent, prevent cancelations. So really there's and there is a content provider checklist kind of meeting the standards for optimal performance and discovery systems I think clearly is a benefit benefit for content providers. For discovery providers, you know, the increasing transparency will improve customer satisfaction, customers being of course end users most important, but also it's really important for librarians and libraries to know exactly what's being searched, that all the content is being searched correctly or searched, I don't know if searched correctly is the right thing to to say. And then for libraries, I think, which is mostly what what again, I'm talking about today, it's really important to make sure that your discovery system is exposing all the content it should be to make this sort of what generally is the goal of all in one searching or one stop shopping work effectively and the Open Discovery Initiative and doing the checklist will make it easier kind of to understand how well your system's working and identify gaps where maybe there's room for improvement. So. As I move on. This is just we use this graphic a lot. So basically it shows the three kind of big stakeholder groups and the understanding that we're all kind of in this together and what a discovery provider does can have an impact on content providers and libraries. And the same with libraries. What we do can have an impact on content providers if perhaps we're not configuring something correctly and the content is not being used as much, there are lower usage stats, etc. So that the main thing is we're we're kind of all in this together. It's a cooperative. Cooperative. Operations, so to speak. The Open Discovery Committee has representatives from libraries and the discovery providers and content providers. And it's just important. That it's all built on kind of cooperation. So. Conformance statements. Why? Why would you want to put out a statement saying that, you know, you're your. I don't know 80-90% conformant with an ODI recommended recommended practice. Well, here are some basic, basic possibilities. They they kind of show one show the world you're doing your best to be conformant with the recommended practice. Completing a conformance statement goes a long way to showing transparency and facilitates some communication and a conformance statement, which I hope we'll see in a minute. Can can provide a reader kind of a quick overview of where your organization is in terms of the recommended practice. So. All of those. All of those are, I think, pretty good reasons why you might want to complete a conformance statement. And if I move move along here, the conformance checklist. So I don't know how helpful the screenshots were, but they take up some real estate anyway. These are the three kind of screenshots of the three different conformance conformance checklists, and after I stopped sharing my presentation at the end, I can drop into chat all the links to the different checklists and the documentation as well. Sorry I didn't do that at the beginning, but things I really want to stress, one, that being conformant, we kind of say it's an iterative process. It's not like you fill out a conformance checklist and you're done. You're conformit or you're not. Things change and things, things grow. Discovery systems are works in progress. As I said, that checklist can help you kind of identify areas to fill in and work on. And we always say in just about every presentation I've been involved in, that perfect is the enemy of good just meaning that we don't expect anyone to do conformance statement that's 100% perfect. I know certainly my libraries is not one. My library does not have 100% perfection at all. What what we're just hoping for is people review this and start doing the checklist and updating them and updating their conformance statements as they go along. And I will show you examples of the conformance checklist and statement in a couple minutes. So. And again, remember, you can always you can always update a conformance conformance checklist. So. As I said earlier, the process of completing the checklist it says here facilitates communication and understanding workflow and staff role. So I want to digress for a second. In early 2019, when the Open Discovery Initiative Committee was starting to work on the revision of the recommended practice or kind of in the middle of it, actually. We did another survey and this one was just of libraries regarding their discovery implementations. The result of this survey made it clear a few things clear. Some of them, I'm sure, are not not surprising, but one of them. First off, it made it clear that in many cases the implementation of discovery systems really fell primarily to one staff member. And anyone who's worked in a smaller library and I have worked in a smaller library in the past. Won't really be surprised by that, I don't think. But another thing we found out. Was that quite a number of times the respondents would say, well, the person who implemented or configured our discovery system has since moved on to another job. And I don't really know how to do this. They didn't leave documentation or something, so. Some of that information was used. You'll see in the conformance checklist where we have conformance best practices for maintaining documentation and assigning individuals for specific tasks. So but the conformance checklist for the libraries focuses on responsibility of the libraries to kind of just configure the discovery system to optimal performance. So as I think everyone knows, the discovery system is not going to configure itself, of course, but we try to get at, you know, certainly the discovery providers have a big responsibility to provide us with products that that work and content providers have responsibilities, but so do libraries as well. And we one of our responsibilities is to make sure that. That it's working correctly. And if it's not. Take steps to to. That could be working with the discovery provider or content provider to correct correct problems. So. Anyway. Covered in this checklist are areas such as staff roles and documentation and collaboration and at my home institution of Northwestern. The process of doing the conformance checklists really did help improve some mutual understanding among library staff of what others are working on. We're a large enough organization that we have a number of people working in different areas. So for instance, understanding of all the staff has different staff assignments in relation to the discovery system is clearly very important. And while we didn't change any work assignments, it became clear who is taking responsibility in certain areas for certain things. This is important, particularly in terms of problem solving and it really improves some cross team communication and. And was very, very helpful in identifying some other other things we needed to improve. So. For instance, tracking down the correct location for a role can be a challenge in a really large distributed organization, and not everyone knowing what everyone else is doing can help the sort of cross team communication helped everyone get a better idea. So I kind of repeated myself there. But for instance, our we have what we call a Primo team for our discovery system, and we're really more aware of some of the major work our electronic resources librarians do and activating and selecting databases and collections and some of the problems they sometimes run into. So that's been really productive. Library staff in the Primo team and as a whole lot better informed about who to contact with with specific problems. So and I think I forgot to forward my my slides. So just a second. Oh, no, I didn't. I went too far. Oh, no, I'm previewing the next screen. But anyway, I'll just keep talking. I was mostly done. So. It's been really helpful to convene that group from across the libraries, to have this kind of discussion on configuration options that I think the checklist really, really helped with. So here is I just took some screenshots of some just a few examples from the library checklist. This is our Northwestern's one and this these are a couple ones that were pretty easy for us to answer. We have individuals designated to be responsible for Discovery Service, Link Resolver, or proxy, etc. We have ranking and authentication options available for subscribed content. So that's that's all good. That's just an example of the checklist that I'm going to move on to places where we needed some work, for instance, this was our electronic resources. People put some of these comments in. So we work with vendors to create detailed agreements. Well, we don't completely only sometimes build their content and we do happen sometimes with new content. So we check and evaluate ODI conformance statements. We really only do this necessary to problem solve or setup. So that's a couple examples of things we maybe could improve on and continuing. Things like, well, I didn't put. We also need to improve our documentation, although we're working on it. So in case people leave, there'll still be record and documentation of how we did things but also place we really need to do some work as execute some staff training program for staff, working with the Discovery Service, Link Resolver, etc. And we also probably could do some more training sessions for public as well. Now I know, you know, the discovery system is supposed to be intuitive, but we found that sometimes some training sessions can be beneficial at times. So those were just a couple examples of how we we have some, some work to do and how it's kind of helped us. You know, now we can maybe get our heads around. Well, we really do need to do a certain number of training sessions. So we really do need to do some more documentation to describe not only how but why. Because I've had examples where people are like, Well, why did we do that? You know, why did we put, I don't know, a table of contents here on the record? Why isn't it up there that came up yesterday and it would be good to have some record of there was that was just a happy accident or if there was a reason for that so.

 

Speaker 2 So again, here I kind of talked about this earlier. I guess I got a little out of order, but the regular meetings on configuration have helped understanding better about what our electronic resources folks do with activation of various databases and getting more in touch with the official documentation. Now, we've all used some of it over the years, but I think we have a better idea where we're really paying better attention as well. So the library checklist has really helped us help us with that and. If I move out here, I've linked some completed conformance statements as well. So why don't I just jump right to libraries here? And let's see. Just a second I'm going to have to share something else here. Just one minute, please. Here we go. And. Oh. Nope. Apologies. Just one second. Here we go. So you should see my completed conformance statements page, and you can go to one of these. I'll go to the our example here. And so if you're at a at a library, we we'd really love to have some more completed conformance statements. But anyway, I'm going to go to Northwestern and this is our page here about what what is the Open Discovery Initiative? And why do libraries commit to open discovery, encourage this transparency cooperation? And then we have a link, a link right out to our our document, which anyone can look at. And you can go down through it and you would documentation being improved, we haven't documented all decisions. So we have a lot of yeses, but we have some things to work on. And we had one hard no, which honestly was kind of a hard ask. It's not that we can't ever do it. Advocates increasing ODI conformance for content providers and discovery service providers. This is the sort of thing I might do. We don't regularly do it, which is why it got a no. In fact, I think we've hardly ever done it, but it would be a good thing. When I when sales people contact me with their latest updates or upgrades or new databases it would be a good thing to bring up. We put a no because honestly, we couldn't say that we'd actually done that yet. It would be nice to at least to get that to a P just you know, when you're talking to a content provider or our discovery provider, how is your conformance coming? Have you are you aware of this? So. These are. We have some comments here. And then that stuff, that's kind of the end of it. So that's our specific. Specific conformance statement which is really honestly is based on the checklist. You can be as visit some of the other libraries here and then we can if we go back to the ODI page. And I'll go to conformance statements. And again, I'll pass along all those links to you. You can see the discovery providers or you can see the the checklist here. So you can see what the content providers have to do and the discovery providers, these are actually will be downloaded as word documents. But if we go, we can see which content providers so far and there are a few APA, IEEE, Oxford, ProQuest and Springer. We're always looking for more and discovery providers. We have experts in OCLC so far. Again, we expect we'll get EBSCO in there. We we have representatives on the open discovery committee of all of the different, different big discovery providers. And I should. Before I. I feel I should have done this earlier. I'm going to go back to our document for a second because I just. Sorry about the scrolling. I'm going to go to the. Are that near the top and I'm probably in the wrong place. Okay. Let's see. And we have. I'm looking for. I just wanted to show you the list of the members of the committee there. Oh, here is the working group. This is the original minute. Here we go. This is our current. These are great people to work with. And these are. Some of our reps. It's a people rotate on and off of the committee, but we have representatives from a wide variety and they all worked really hard on putting together this some this particular document. So. Here. I will go back to my PowerPoint presentation. And. And I'm going to move forward one more time.

 

Speaker 2 So here in the conclusion, I just we're really urging people to look at the recommended practice document and complete publishing conformance statement, which would be great. But again, I want to emphasize, it certainly doesn't have to be perfect just to show you're kind of working on this, I think will be super and I think you'll feel that benefits, too. And there's, you know, no time rush. You can take a few months to complete it. Some people have or you can do it really quickly and you can always bring up ODI conformance with any vendors just to see what they have to say. This is a link right out to the Open Discovery Open Discovery website, which I can go to in a minute. And then here's my obligatory last slide, the Thank you! Questions? But I'm really kind of excited about this. I think it's really been helpful for me. And as for our library to be part of the Open Discovery Initiative, and I think this promoting of transparency is something that is really helpful to me as a librarian when I'm on the public services desk to be able to know a little bit more about what's in our discovery system, because honestly, that's what a lot of our students are using. We have a single search box on the web page that where most of them go to. We have options where you can narrow down to just the catalog or other things. And our advanced searchers certainly use the individual databases, but a lot of our students are using the discovery. So I think it's really important that we were taking part in this and. Well, that's my, that's my basic introduction to ODI and I'd be really happy to answer any questions now or, or in the future. And I will also in the chat in a minute I'll include some links and the Open Discovery Initiative email as well, which you can check.

 

Speaker 1 So Geoff I have posted some of the links into chat there, although I may not have included everything that you were intending to share, so you might want to maybe toss some extra links in there if you have them. For everyone who's on the call, if you have any questions, by all means go ahead and place them in the chat and we'll start reading through those. Or if you want to unmute yourselves and ask a question, you're more than welcome to do that too. I thought that well, first of all, I want to say thank you. I think that was an excellent presentation. I know that I have been working with discovery leaders, you know, for many years. But, you know, I had not yet stumbled upon ODI and conformance statements until earlier this year. And I suspect that, you know, the conformance statements are also very new to many, if not most of us in the crowd today as well. So thank you for sort of giving us giving us an introduction to them.

 

Speaker 2 My pleasure.

 

Speaker 1 That's and another thing I definitely want to thank you for pointing out is the and I think iterated a few times was perfection is not the goal here. And that makes, I think, us feel better certainly makes me feel better that the purpose of the conformance statement is not to get something perfect, but rather just to help you do your due diligence, which I think many of us, especially librarians, I mean, come on, let's all admit it. We love our checklists. We love our checklists. Then it helps us to do our due diligence. And I know that if I were responsible for something like a discovery layer, it's nice to have a resource like this. And so that's I think we had a few questions. Come in here. Let's see what we got. Can you repeat the goals of the library checklist? I believe the first goal was regular meetings on configuration.

 

Speaker 2 Oh, sure. So that really the the goals of the checklist. Ah that was definitely one of them. But basically I think overall most of them revolve around configuration and making sure that the configuration is is correct and that you're doing your documenting your decisions and that you're doing you're kind of taking some steps to make sure both your staff and your library, public, library, public, your patrons, your constituency also have training opportunities if, if wanted. So, um, and I should point out that this was a big, um, a big addition to the, um. This iteration of the recommended practice document. So those were kind of some of the some of the goals, really. That's what some of them that's what the the goals of the library checklist kind of revolve around specifically. Thanks for the question.

 

Speaker 1 And Jim. Jim, maybe you could on your mark to ask your question, because I'm sort of reading through it, but I'm not entirely sure if I if I'm capturing it right here, sir. It sounds like you're asking about some sort of a benchmark for the vendors to measure against. Is that right? For example, sites hit their Primo, EDS, Summon, all search "higgs boson" send the first top 100 results then scored on how each of them did. So it sounds like you're trying to like compare discovery services against each other there too. Is that right?

 

Speaker 2 I'm looking at it too.

 

Speaker 1 And maybe Jim's not able to unmute himself, so we'll give him a moment to maybe add something to the chat. While we're waiting on that, though, I did want to ask one question about the recommended best practices, or I think they just call it the recommended practices, whatever it was called. So it sounded like the first version of that came out in 2014. And then there was a revised one that came out. Yes, 2020. Is there is there a sort of a goal for the committee to regularly revise these? Or is there sort of like a plan for the future for these conformance statements, you know, updating the checklists or implementing feedback?

 

Speaker 2 There's not a a specific timeline to re to issue a new recommended practice document, but I think by the nature of it will have to the committee will continually have to update every 4-5, six years. But no, we don't have specific, set in stone. We will re, you know, reissue the document every certain amount of time, but just the nature of the work. Right now we're. We're doing more in terms of kind of promoting and outreach and things like that. But there are always some I think there'll always be a need to kind of revise and. Again. But for the time being, I think it's safe to say for the next probably three years at least, this is the document. Right now.

 

Speaker 1 And Jim has added here is like daily Wordle comes out each day, you don't know till that day, so quarterly shock search count no vendor prep. It's sort of like a surprise check in Jim that's what it sounds like you're saying.

 

Speaker 2 Yeah that's kind of interesting. That would be actually really interesting I think to do that compare now.

 

Speaker 1 I think one of the problems you'll run into there, though, is in order for it to be a fair comparison. I mean, again, we would, you'd almost up to ensure that the discovery layers are configured identically in a way, but I don't even know if that's possible during configurations between Summon to say EBSCO, might be sort of very different.

 

Speaker 2 Yeah, because some of the the content is all not going to be exactly, exactly the same in each discovery system. Like certain metadata providers may not provide it to each discovery system for whatever reason. But still, it's an intriguing idea, actually.

 

Speaker 1 Yeah, I agree. It is intriguing. Jim you hold on to that idea. Maybe we can make something of it one day. And we have a question here from Derek. As far as setting a focus for institutions with limited staff, are there any recommendations for specific checklist targets for smaller libraries? So maybe like targeting a subset of the checklist Derek, is that maybe what you're suggesting?

 

Speaker 2 That's a good question.

 

Speaker 2 We didn't specifically talk about that, but it's a really. You know mostly we focused on just do whatever, whatever you can do. But that's a good question because my first library job was really small academic library, so I can kind of appreciate that. I would. Hmm. I'd have to look at that to be really honest and see if there are specific things that should be should be focused on first, maybe. And this is just me, not the committee. So I could be incorrect here, but maybe, you know, certain things like making sure the correct database collections are available seems to me to be a top priority. Maybe making sure the upgrades are run. I mean, our vendor now Ex Libris, since we're in the cloud, runs the upgrades for us. So that used to be a much bigger deal. We'd have to like schedule an upgrade and that was some oh that could be painful, but it's really seamless now. So I'm sorry, I don't have a better answer than that, but I would start with, you know, making sure all the content is appearing as it should. And, you know, if it's not working with the discovery provider because they should help you with that. So. Yeah.

 

Speaker 1 And for what it's worth, I know, I think on one of your slides you were showing the discovery providers who have published a conformance statement and you mentioned you hope to get one from EBSCO soon. If I recall correctly, I do kind of I think I remember seeing them having published something on their website somewhere when I was sort of kicking around. But I don't know if maybe it wasn't official yet or they just haven't, you know, asked to be included on that list. But since I mentioned that because most of us are an EBSCO crowd here, so if anyone's curious, I think if you do sort of Google a, you know, the phrase EBSCO and conformance statement, I think you should be able to find EBSCO's. I know that for my part it was interesting to begin reading through their conformance checklist to see what they put because I felt that at times I didn't always agree with what they put. Have you ever had that sort of come up before? 

 

Speaker 2 Well, yeah. I think if there is something that you don't agree, I think it's out of transparency. It it's perfectly acceptable to maybe email your reps, go up and say, hey, I need some more information because you said, you know, you do this, but I haven't seen evidence of it, are we? And you could phrase it like, are we not doing something right? Or that might be how I would. So, you know, not to make them defensive or anything, although you're the customer, so.

 

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Richard and Cathy for posting that. Yeah, that's what I had come across before. So it is kind of interesting to sort of read what they have published against your own experience. But you know, more to your point, Geoff, I mean, that's a perfect way to sort of, you know, facilitate that communication between you and the content provider or the discovery provider. And just like, hey, let's talk about the specific recommended best practice and.

 

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I will on my we have an ODI meeting this Friday so I will ask our EBSCO rep if they can get the link up on the site because that would be helpful to. But thanks for putting that in the chat.

 

Speaker 1 All right. Are there any more questions from the crowd?

 

Speaker 2 I put my email in the chat and I put the ODI email in there as well and you can email me at any time. If you have questions about this or anything, that would be fantastic. I appreciate you taking the time to listen to me talk about this.

 

Speaker 1 I appreciate you coming today and talking about it for us. I hope this was helpful to everybody. And thanks again to everybody for turning out and have a great day, everyone.

 

Speaker 2 Okay. And if you do have questions, don't hesitate to follow up with me. Seriously. Happy to hear from anyone. So have a good day.

 

Speaker 1 Thank you.