NASIG 2007 talk: A New Approach to Service Discovery and Resource Delivery

Here are the slides [1] (all one hundred and thirty-freakin'-five of them) from the keynote/"vision" talk I gave yesterday morning in Louisville, KY at NASIG 2007. I was very sorry to miss most of the rest of the conference, but was quite glad to have the chance to present this talk to a very engaged crowd (especially considering it was 8am on a Sunday) and catch up with several friends I hadn't seen in ages after the talk.

The name of this talk is -

A New Approach to Service Discovery and Resource Delivery

...and that's what it's about.

In it I reprised some slides and concepts from previous talks I've given at a NISO meeting last November [2] and code4libcon this past March [3] and a few more slides from an earlier Access talk. But rather than just rehash slides explaining why COinS and unAPI are useful, I tried to place their potential benefits in a critical light, and from that perspective, I tried to state a much higher standard we need to try to reach for, and not settle for less, and one obvious (to me) way to get started.

That path is through the dynamic service links [4] we now see everywhere. In this talk you'll see a series of slides about 2/3 through that start to explain what I think we should work on next - a way to unify interfaces to those peskily incompatible service link boxes that would open up a ton of doors that would remain closed even if COinS and unAPI both really exploded.

So have a look, and, if they don't make sense on their own, rest assured that a healthy number of serials librarians (at least a good 1/3 to 1/2 out of several hundreds at one point or another) seemed to be nodding vigorously in agreement with the proposal early yesterday morning.

I'll do my best to give it a more direct blog writeup in the next week or so, but I'll be offline a lot this week for some old-fashioned Stuff To Do and Places To Go. In the meantime, enjoy the 135 slides. :P