Professional Development

I decided I’d rather not leave my truck in Greensboro in airport parking for a week. So, at 7:20 Tuesday morning Kathie dropped me off at the WS Transportation Center on Liberty Street. At 7:30, I boarded a PART bus for the Greensboro hub. It cost me $2. In Greensboro, I transferred to a bus, which took me to PTI. This whole escapade cost me only $2-what an amazing deal! I’m writing Al Gore!

In DC, I saw kazillion reporters parked outside th Federal ?Courthouse awaiting the Scooter Libby verdict. Poor Scooter….(NOT!)

There is no free internet in my hotel
I’ve schlepped over to a cafe at Union Station to blog. Things start tomorrow.

Electronic Resources and Librarians is an excellent conference–focused, well-run, and invigorating.

I highly recommend it for folks who may want to attend next year.

The entire conference–schedule, PowerPoint presentations, conference blog, conference wiki, and audio from each presentation–is available online, and if you’d like more information, I’d be happy to help you find it. (That is, I’d be happy to log in and get the information to you.)

If you’d like, check out some photos taken by ERL staff or check out some photos uploaded by ERL attendees.

On Saturday morning, I attended 2 sessions.

The Challenges and Opportunities for Cataloging in Today’s Changing Metadata Environment

Sandy Chen, New College of Florida.

Chen started with the question: Must MARC die? She concluded, no–thanks only to XML which is breathing new life into MARC.

She then provided a broad overview of several metadata schema and crosswalks necessary to work back and forth among them.

Next, she provided an overview of FRBR and examined what OPAC display might be like under FBRR.

And lastly, she looked at FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology)–which I had never heard of. The easiest and quickest explanation I can provide is that it’s a new protocol which breaks LC subject headings into their constituent parts and treats each part as its own individual tag in order to facilitate the tagging of texts in an electronic environment.

I’d be happy to discuss this presentation in further detail with anyone who’s interested, but I imagine this will be limited to a small subset of Technical Services folks….

Mediawiki Open-Source Software as Infrastructure for Electronic Resource Outreach

Millie Jackson, Jonathan Blackburn, FSU

This presentation explained FSU’s nascent attempts to create wiki subject guides to replace their static subject guide web pages. They explained their choice of MediaWiki as their software choice and explained how they were providing wiki training to subject/outreach librarians at FSU. Plus, they commented on their fast roll-out–accomplished in only a month, and their need to develop a set of “best practices” to share among their colleagues in order to ensure a quality presence.

Furthermore, they discussed how their implementation doesn’t really fit the Wikipedia model in that only the subject/outreach librarians will have editing privileges. On the surface, this seems like a perfectly reasonable choice. But I have to admit that I had an epiphany during this presentation–but not necessarily from anything said during this one hour. Instead, I think it was a culmination of the entire conference which came to fruition during this final session.

And the epiphany took the form of a question–why not provide a true wiki for subject guides? Why not trust the user-generated content? Why position the librarian as the sole “expert” in this situation? As a profession, we are frequently lamenting the fact that we can’t seem to get professors to allow us to “partner” with them. However, in this instance, aren’t we being guilty of not being willing to partner with our users? Aren’t we constructing a barrier behind which we can claim a position of authority? Isn’t this what frustrates us about faculty?

Erik and I have been round-and-round about the idea of trust, and I’m finally ready to make that leap with Erik…. It’s time for us to open ourselves up–and trust our users.

It’s also time, on a larger scale, to stop doing things just because we’ve always done them.

Closing Session

Managing the Virtual Library

Jane Burke, Vice President, Proquest CSA, General Manager, Serials Solutions

As a broad introduction, Burke announced that her presentation would do the following:

• Ignore day-to-day issues.
• Ignore traditional values in order to preserve an ability to deliver information to end-users.
• Attempt to be deliberately controversial.

And her warning about what she was going to say was on target—except that she failed to disclose that much of what she was going to say dovetails nicely with the goals of the companies which she represents. This remark isn’t a criticism of her talk because I tend to agree with her compelling ideas; it’s just a reminder of the lens through which we need to view her comments.

Her ideas on the current state of libraries and some developments she’s heard about through her work:

• The old model of library use is gone. It was developed in 60s with big bucks being infused into universities. Librarians spent the money on what they could buy—big buildings and print collections. This is no longer the environment in which we operate—for multiple reasons.
• Most libraries are approaching 50% of their materials budgets spent on e-resources; we know that these resources are under-utilized. We also know that these electronic collections are much more volatile and thus harder to manage than traditional print resources. But rather than bemoaning the paradigm shift, we have to remember it’s all about the USERS and what they need.
• Burke referenced a recent article in the Feb. 15 Library Journal on Google Scholar and its popularity. We can’t bother trying to teach users individual interfaces any longer; we have to meet them at Google which is what they prefer to use. There has been a paradigm shift.
• There has been a fundamental change in the academy: Courseware and Google are the lingua franca.
• A university in Minnesota (one of the satellite campuses) has moved the reference librarians’ offices from the library into academic departments. They no longer live in the library.
• Disintermediation—a “coming apart” is a current risk for libraries.

So, what can we do?

Align priorities and behaviors with reality. Stop doing lots of stuff that isn’t appreciated by users. Her basic mantra: you can do anything but you can’t do everything. Included among the activities Burke recommends us giving up or revising:

• Reintegrate technical services and put E-resources at the heart of your activities. Discontinue all the processing activities associated with print resources—“Starve the books; they won’t go away. Just don’t focus on them.”
• Stop doing Bibliographic Instruction. It doesn’t work.
• Don’t accept the “long tail” as an excuse—there aren’t enough staff resources. The long tail doesn’t apply to us in libraries.
• Stop serials check in; don’t worry about claiming. Rely on RSS to alert readers to new issues/articles.
• Treat the ERM as the acquisitions module for E-resources.
• Buy your metadata when possible and use local expertise to develop only that which can’t be purchased.
• Use hosted systems. Think: SaaS (Software as a Service). This will preserve time and money for unique resources

Tools for our use:

• On Discovery: You must make some sort of federated searching option available for your patrons. No, it won’t be perfect, but they’re using Google Scholar as their federated search engine now, and if we don’t offer an alternative, we’ve lost the battle.
• On the new Discover layer: Burke thinks there are a few main players: Primo, Encore, Open World Cat, and Google Scholar. It’s too early to tell which will win out, but something will. You can’t wait, however, to see which one wins. All solutions are temporary until something better comes along.
• Push your link resolver to get what you need. Hold your vendors accountable. Also, skip the landing page; you don’t need it. Patrons find it intrusive; instead, put branding on the article and save the patrons a step. If it fails, then have a landing page. But remember they want one-click access.
• “Gotta have XML.” Get an XML server layer for your ILS; understand XML gateways to publishers.
• Support the NISO MXG effort. (This gets XML into federated search products.)
• Learn to speak ONIX (XML-based set of standards): This is one of the tools that Barnes and Noble and Borders use to present data to their customers.
• Participate in the development of ERAMS. (In some ways, Burke seemed to be suggesting that this would replace ERMs; then at other moments, she suggested that ERAMS would live on top of and be supported by ERMs.) So what does ERAMS stand for? E-Resource Access and Management Services. It’s a new way of thinking about how we manage library collections and make them accessible. ERAMS will:
  • Collect—a comprehensive e-resource knowledgebase which will allow the deployment of a library’s entire e-resources collection in one single, easy-to-use interface.
  • Correct—maintain the accuracy of currently available content through a team-maintained knowledgebase (because no single library can manage a thorough knowledgebase).
  • Connect—provide users with answers using the best method.
  • Control—give libraries the tools needed to budget, analyze collections, etc.

We don’t know what will make ERAMS complete, but that’s why librarians have to help vendors design them.

Conclusion:

“Being” truly Web 2.0 means that you do the whole thing: harness the collective intelligence and judge ourselves by YouTube and Fickr. Are we the center of our community?

After all, the relevance question is on the table…. If we’re questioning it ourselves, then you’d better bet the provost is questioning our relevance when he or she talks to the president.

Here are some thoughts about the sessions I attended on the second day.

Don’t leave me in the dark

Shining a light on Electronic Resources Communications

Nathan Rupp, ER Librarian, Cornell

Since Cornell spends approximately 40% of their $15M acquisitions budget on electronic resources, they are obviously concerned about an effective and efficient deployment of these resources. Cornell’s has attempted to mitigate communication breakdowns among all the parties involved in deploying electronic resources with three initiatives:

• Redesign of Technical Services.
• Embedding Technical Services librarians across library teams/committees.
• Employing various IT solutions.

1. Redesign of Technical Services:

After the Technical Services reorganization, there are four units:

• Acquisitions/cataloging
• Database management services
• Eresources and serials management
• Metadata services.

The key here is the combination of Eresources and serials together because of their logical connections. Furthermore, this combination allows for focused crosstraining that prevents functional silos from developing.

2. Embedding Technical Services librarians across library teams/committees.

Embedding Eresources librarian into selection units and committees; the key goal here is to allow Technical Services personnel to become involved very early in the deployment process, thereby preventing potential later delays.

One of the most important embedded positions is one on their Database Review Committee which is responsible for allocating additional resources to selectors who don’t have enough money to purchase high-cost items. Since these large databases often require significant Technical Services work for deployment, it’s especially crucial to get T.S. involved early in the process.

Another key embedded position is on their Systems Department Committee called ReDS—a group that is responsible for investigating and developing next-generation finding tools for their libraries.

3. Employing various IT solutions.

Among other initiatives described in the presentation, the most interesting IT solution is an e-form which they use to process new electronic resources.

The key is for selectors and Collection Management personnel to provide all the key information to Technical Services in a single, standard format.

Other random notes:

They’re struggling to determine if they need to provide 24-7 support for e-resources. In effect, they have some staff who have informally taken on responsibility for monitoring patron problems on what amounts to a 24-7 basis. But they don’t know if or how they could make this an official policy.

Their ERM is used only by Technical Services staff.

Using Web 2.0 Technologies to Push Your E-Resources

Cindy Carpenter, Georgia Tech; Sarah Steiner, Georgia State

Cindy Carpenter described Georgia Tech’s desire to break out of library website prison using Web 2.0/Social software.

Among the interesting ideas which are germane to us at Wake: the use of wikis to replace static Subject Guide webpages. Among the most interesting examples was a business wiki developed by a librarian at Ohio University.

Another interesting tool: the creation of screencasting to create various kinds of research guides—for instance, showing students how to search Lexis-Nexis for specific newspapers. The key here is to not bury the content on the library’s website but to post it to YouTube so that students will be much more likely to find it—or will remember how to look for it at some point in the future once they know it exists. Obviously, serendipity may lead them to find the content on YouTube, but more likely, they will learn that the content exists during a B.I. or reference transaction and will remember where to look for the tool on YouTube in the future even if they don’t remember the intricacies of Lexis-Nexis.

Steiner talked primarily about Facebook and MySpace. She and Carpenter spoke about a colleague at Georgia Tech, Brian Matthews, who regularly scans student blogs and other student virtual spaces in order to “jump in” with research advice as possible. The model of actively meeting students where they are on the web may be more aggressive than some would be comfortable with; however, the model is out there and it works at Georgia Tech.

The Evolution of a New World Order: How and Why UCLA Drew the Line between ‘P’ and ‘E’

Sharon Farb, Andrew Stancliffe, and Angela Riggio described the formation of a Digital Collections Services Unit at UCLA.

The unit, in existence for less than a year, has staff with expertise in Acquisitions, Metadata, Collection Management, and Licensing. In addition, their Liaison to the California Digital Library is part of the unit. As they were putting together the unit, they recognized that it had to be formed with high-level staff and that they had to cultivate a strong working relationship with selectors and public services.

What’s working well with the new unit:

• Centralization of licensing, electronic acquisitions, ERM maintenance, and SFX activation in one place.
• Library staff know where to go.
• Troubleshooting.

Note: they have a home-grown ERM, but CDL just purchased Verde for all the participating institutions, so they will begin using it in the next year. Interestingly, they anticipate running both systems until they are comfortable with discontinuing their in-house ERM.

What’s not yet working as well as they would like:

• Well-defined roles for selectors and the DCS with respect to ERM maintenance have not been defined yet.
• Print acquisitions still need to be more involved to handle print + online subscriptions.
• Lack of understanding by some selectors about letting the DCS unit take over the deployment process.

The most striking part of the whole presentation, and what was referenced at many points throughout the rest of the conference was a single shocking slide:

The 39 FTE positions in the flowchart on the left represent those working on print acquisitions. The 7.5 FTE positions in the flowchart on the right represent those working on e-resource deployment. To put this in context, their print/electronic split in their budget is 60% print/40% electronic.

This dichotomy is even more striking when you learn that the DCS unit is also responsible for handling Scholarly Communication initiatives for the libraries and the campus as a whole: copyright, intellectual property, rights metadata, and e-scholarship repository work especially as it pertains to the California Digital Library.

39 to 7.5. 60% to 40%.

If there were one statistic which could encapsulate the message of the entire conference, this would be it.

Tips for Tackling Electronic Resources

Dennis Gibbons, Susan Hawk, Dennis Odom, Texas Christian University

General Tips

Susan Hawk

1. Select a composite team (systems, public services, cataloging, periodicals, collection development, and acquisitions). Make sure that the team has a well-established, often revised mission statement.
2. Develop and promote policy statements, both for public and private consumption.
3. Develop and streamline workflows for specific situations/types of resources.
4. Provide OPAC redundancy.
5. Cultivate vendors and use their training sessions/free publicity materials.

Best practice narrative: Faculty/Vendor/Library partnership

Dennis Gibbons

As the leader of the Collection Management team, Gibbons described their situation at TCU—and there was much envy in the room. Over the past few years, they have been experiencing growth in their materials budgets. Moreover, they can carry over unspent funds from one year to the next, so they can save funds for strategic purchases if they plan properly.

Note: they’re a liberal arts institution which sounds similar in some ways to Wake, actually.

So their success story began with using some of their saved money to fulfill strong faculty requests for American Periodicals Series and Early American Imprints: Evans and Shaw-Shoemaker.

In an attempt to foster a relationship with the grateful faculty, Collection Management took the faculty to ask for faculty assistance with helping make the case for even stronger institutional support for the library and to solicit testimonials for and evaluations of the new products.

This led to several other purchases, accomplished with creative financing: Early American Newspapers and the U.S. Congressional Serial Set.

Then, of course, the faculty started asking for ECCO. This was too expensive for TCU’s budget. However, because the library had established these strong partnerships with the faculty (especially the Chair of the English Department), they collectively put together a grant proposal for funding from the Trustees’ Strategic Initiative Fund. And because they received funding through this campus-wide process, they were able to purchase ECCO. To celebrate, the library hosted an 18^th-century Salon party attended by the Provost, faculty members, library staff, and two VPs from Thompson-Gale—another way to express gratitude to the Provost and faculty who worked hard to get the Trustees’ grant.

Workflows

Dennis Odom

The workflows discussion didn’t contain much ground-breaking information other than to confirm our feeling that, on the whole, Serials Solutions does a pretty good job with their products. They are cancelling as much print as possible because they are out of space.

During the question/comments section at the end of the presentation, one person reported on her library’s current attempt to seek funds from a local office of a Big 4 accounting firm to purchase an accounting database since neither the library nor the accounting department could afford the subscription.

Opening Plenary Session, Day 2

Nathan D.M. Robertson, University of Maryland School of Law

Kristin Eschenfelder, University of Wisconsin, Assoc. Professor School of Library and Information Studies

Robertson provided a basic overview of Copyright and Contract Law and how they apply to intellectual property licensing discussions.

One of the most interesting parts of this discussion was the initiative described at www.editeur.org

The organization is a collection of people working on developing standards for “electronic commerce in the books and serials communities.” In particular, they are looking at standards for encoding license interpretations into ERMs. This should facilitate the negotiation process and allow consortial partners to share interpretations and coding. This won’t solve a lot of the current ambiguities; however, it will smooth the process somewhat.

Eschenfelder then spoke about her work which studies the negotiation process between librarians and their “supplier partners.” In particular, she spoke about Digital Rights Management which is yet another layer of complexity on top of licenses. Her Motivating Question: Will digital scholarly licensed resources come to be protected by DRM in a manner similar to popular consumer media? What’s going on with DRM in the scholarly resource market?

She argues that DRM should be replaced by narrower term, technological protection measure. TPM is a narrower term referring to technological tools employed to control access to or use of a digital resource. Furthermore, she proposes a refinement of librarians’ usage of various terms. Our current conceptualizations of TPM are too narrow; we should talk about Hard TPM and Soft TPM:

• Hard TPM: tools that strictly control or disallow certain uses.
• Soft TMP: tools that discourage certain uses. Use may be achieved trough workarounds that may be non-obvious or inconvenient.

Examples of Hard TPM:

Secure container system that encrypts content and requires an external software device to decrypt and serve the content to the user. Patron may or may not be able to save content to a local location. E.G., ARTstor and SAEInternational both require secure container devices. On the good side, ARTstor allows you to save the whole container to desktop; on the more troubling side, SAEInternational—allows you to print, but you can’t store to the desktop.

Basic examples of Soft TPM:

• NetLibrary. Content is chunked—very inconvenient.

Eschenfelder’s basic point: SOFT TPM is changing the way we should think about our rights.

She identifies six types of soft TPM:

1. Extent of use TPM.Blocks excessive or suspicious extent of useBatch sizes limits are in place (e.g., EBBO and ECHO which limit how much users can view from the results of their search).
2. TPM by obfuscation. Interface does not adequately advertise use functionality (e.g., users have to put something in your “box” before you can print them out).
3. TPM by omission. Users have to use browser or operating tools for functionality (e.g., HTML version of NetLibraries where you can’t right click to get a copy toolbar).
4. TMP by decomposition. Putting things into HTML which limits usability for patrons, especially printing and emailing.
5. TPM by frustration. Content is broken up into chunks. Or sometimes, having to download the “whole” can be just as bad.
6. TPM by threat. Declaration of end-use or popups that discourage uses. (e.g., Science Direct pop-ups which seem to threaten students with expulsion if they misuse the downloads).The question remains: are soft TPM really intentional? Or are they just bad design?

   Eschenfelder’s point is that we need to be vigilant about documenting these limitations and develop vocabulary to describe the problems so that we can then determine if it’s intentional or not.

Some highlights of the other presentations I attended, Day 1.

Beyond Proof of Concept: Social Software

Zoe Stewart-Marshall (Cornell) and Mason Hall (FSU) discussed the use of social software in their respective libraries.

Stewart-Marshall described the limitations to using wikis to document Technical Services workflows at Cornell. While initially hopeful, they realized that their organically grown wiki needed more “care and feeding” in order to make it useful. They should have instituted an organizational plan for the wiki and provided training for its use. There were also some “trust” issues which had to be worked through in order to make the wiki possible.

One of their success stories, however, is the use of Mantis, an open-source tracking system which they use as a bugtracking system. They have developed a webform for selectors to provide all the relevant information to technical services personnel regarding the acquisition and cataloging on electronic resources. The webform standardizes information and doesn’t allow things to fall through the cracks, and this webform is then dumped into Mantis which allows all the interested parties to track the electronic resource’s process through various technical services processes.

Hall discussed the implementation of AOL AIM at FSU for communication purposes. Their implementation has striking similarities with ours, except that they instituted a naming convention whereby they use their university usernames as their screennames to allow for consistency with email addresses.

University of Pretoria Beats to a Different Drum: UPSpace in Rhythm with Research
Elsabe Olivier, University of Pretoria

Olivier described her South African university’s use of DSpace to create an institutional repository, one of the first major repositories in South Africa.

They have an interesting component to their repository. They are archiving not only the scholarly output of one of their major scholars, Jonathan Jansen, but also all of his television/radio interviews, columns in the popular press, university lectures, and so forth. He truly exemplifies the idea of a public intellectual, and UPSpace is collecting his public presence in all its forms. I’ve never heard of using a university repository to do this kind of archiving work, and it is truly fascinating. It also requires very unique copyright negotiations to make it happen, and these negotiations are the responsibility of library personnel on behalf of the university.
https://www.up.ac.za/dspace/

There are also the standard components to their repository–a digital repository of the university’s scholarly output. Also, there are research collections which are housed in the repository.

One of the most important aspects of Olivier’s talk was her discussion of how the university repository became the library’s responsibility, and how this important work has increased the library’s central role in the university’s intellectual life.

The WorldCat Institution Registry: Making the Case

Scott Shultz, OCLC and Celeste Feather, Ohio State.

The description of the “birth” of this new OCLC service reminded me of a line from the movie Field of Dreams: “if you build it, they will come.”

That is, OCLC is building a system whereby libraries can load the data which they share with their “supplier partners” on a regular basis in a standard database maintained by OCLC. For example, you can load billing addresses, local contacts, IP ranges, etc. into the OCLC database and then refer your supplier partners to this site (or send them the URL). That way, if something changes locally with your library, you can edit the information in one central location rather than having to contact all your supplier partners on an individual basis.

The key here is that it’s unclear when or how supplier partners will start using this registry, but the hope is that if enough libraries begin to use the registry, that the supplier partners will start to see its benefits and thereby start using the system too. (This is the “if you build it, they will come” part.)
Celeste Feather described how Ohio State helped in the development of the Institution Registry and how they think they will use it.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore: Delivery of Library Resources through Learning Management Systems.

Cindi Trainor from Claremont Colleges

Trainor described her colleges’ use of Sakai, an open source LMS. The library was chosen as the unit to implement the system because the library is not directly tied to any one of the seven colleges which form Claremont Colleges. Their status as an “independent” unit allowed them to work with everyone and get beyond turf wars.

There wasn’t too much to take from this session which would be applicable to us because we’re a Blackboard campus–except the general idea that we need to do a better job of helping professors learn how to get our licensed content or library designed learning objects into their course pages.

Opening address by Rick Luce
Vice-provost and Director of Libraries, Emory University
Former Director of the Research Library at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Working from his knowledge of the changing horizon of scientific research, Luce attempted to draw a picture of how information services will evolve. His argument is that science is changing the way we “know” things—and thereby changing the foundation of information, knowledge, and even culture itself. Some new science research techniques or technologies (e.g., triple-blind studies, multiple hypothesis matrices, adaptive real-time experiments, wikiscience, nanobiotics) are not only changing the types of information researchers expect but also, more generally and more importantly, changing our understanding of what information is.

Because of this information evolution, Luce argued that libraries must employ a new definition of success:

Success = adding value and providing a compelling experience for our users.

One way that we add value is to become data curation experts.

Another way that libraries add value is for librarians to take responsibility for finding, collating, and presenting information in a coherent and instantaneous manner. That is, if librarians are currently morphing into information professionals, then we need to continue that evolution: we need to become channel editors. A channel editor fulfills a certain role: It’s not about locating separate sources anymore; it’s not about reading “everything” anymore; it’s about integration—collecting relevant information on- and off-line and then machine-collating this information and presenting it in a manner which allows users to manipulate it as their needs demand. This is the task of the channel editor, and if we fulfill this role, then we will have successfully adapted to the new research and knowledge paradigms.

His five primary pieces of advice for building a successful library:

1. Focus on cell phones (or whatever handheld mobile devices replace cell phones) as the means by which patrons will expect to meet their information needs in the not-to-distant future.
2. Dismantle information silos, especially those which dominate our libraries today and prevent the efficient presentation of information.
3. Imagine that you had the power to go to sleep one night and know that the following day you would wake up and work in the perfect library. What would that place be? Then ask yourself what you can do to make that happen.
4. Focus on users’ needs. Why is there disconnect between the library world and the web world?
5. Cultivate customer loyalty by improving the quality of your product and processes.

Jordan provided an overview of OCLC & the library/information industry. He mentioned Worldcat.org (84 million records in woldcat 1.x million holdings, talks clickthroughs - 67M in 2005, 85M in 2006).  Jordan observes that Worldcat is about driving user back to library through access links.  He reports on upcoming features - more content (articlefirst, gpo, eric, medlilne), powerful searching, citation management, resolution. He talked briefly about piloting a direct to user multi-library ILL service in Montana (12 public libraries), integrated Circulation, ILL and direct delivery.

Jordan talked about Worldcat Identities (http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/), a new service which shows author profiles.

Quotes Fred Kilgour - “librarians will move out of the bibliographically infested back halls in to the user infested front halls where it will be necessary to provide new principles, standards, work skills, and new job descriptions and titles”

Michael Tiemann spoke as the keynote lecture during the 2007 Kilgour Symposium. He covered topics on open source sustainability and development principles and looked at how these forces work in industrial, educational, economic, and scholarship environments. Pointing to initiatives like Creative Commons, Open courseware systems, and what an ‘ownership society’ means in contrast to an ‘intellectual property controlled society.’  Some interesting citations - “The generous man“, Game theory & open source development sustainability, Open source enables ‘long tail’ development.