The architecture of the Web is transforming the way systems are built and services delivered, providing libraries with an opportunity to extend their impact

by Tom Storey

In October 2004, 500 titans of the Internet world met in a plush San Francisco hotel to explore the future of the Web. The invitation-only event included some of the Web’s foremost leaders and infl uencers: Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon; Jerry Yang, co-Founder of Yahoo; Marc Andreessen, Founder of Netscape; Mark Cuban, co-Founder of HDNET; Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask Jeeves; and Christopher Payne, Vice President of MSN Search.

For three days, the group discussed the state of the Internet industry and listened to presentations from leaders of innovative start-ups. They debated the most important issues and strategies driving the Internet economy. They evaluated the 2001 dot.com bust—still fresh in the minds of many—and analyzed why certain organizations had failed and others survived. They knew the Web had reached a critical crossroads.

WHAT WAS HAPPENING?

Nothing short of a major paradigm shift, most agreed. The Web was emerging as a full-fledged computing platform—a robust development environment where mixing services and content from disparate, even competing, organizations and Web sites was becoming the norm.

Today, two years later, the trend has not only taken hold but seems to be accelerating. Each day, new businesses and Web sites launch new services and functionality by building on and integrating Web-based applications across the network. And network-based, on-demand computing that organizations can easily plug into is replacing many traditional IT infrastructures and software.

As Tim O’Reilly, co-Founder of the Web 2.0 conference, puts it, “We are at a turning point in the technology industry. The Internet is on the verge of replacing the personal computer as the dominant computing platform. Platform shifts are times of enormous disruption and enormous opportunity.”

Indeed, even Microsoft, the dominant software company for the past decade with its aggressive vision of a personal computer in every home and office, acknowledges that a sweeping transformation in Internet services is taking place. On July 27, 2006, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Chief Software Architect, told a group of financial analysts that all technology companies must embrace the Internet services transformation in some way if they wish to expand their relevance
to their customers moving forward.

“In the previous era, when looking at opportunities, Microsoft would naturally begin by thinking with a PC mindset,” Ozzie said. “But we’re in a new era, an era in which the Internet is at the center of so much of what we do. It’s important to start with a different vantage point. So, we start with an Internet service-centric perspective.”

DEFINING THE NEW NETWORK PLATFORM

Since the 1980s, software development and system engineering has centered primarily on the personal computer. The PC era was characterized by monolithic, proprietary operating systems and programs that had long development times and release cycles. In that environment, the design of software was isolated and all attention focused on a single application.

WHAT DOES MOVING TO THE NETWORK LEVEL MEAN?

Functionality traditionally installed and run on a local computer in a single application is now performed on the network inside workflows that involve many applications. In essence, the Web becomes the “operating system” to which programmers write reusable, constantly updated software components that are delivered over the network and embedded or loosely coupled with other Web applications.

The most popular method of combining, or exposing, these modular applications is through Web services. Web services allow different applications from different sources to communicate with each other without custom coding using emerging Web protocols. The services are not tied to any one operating system or programming language. Web services range from simple URL requests and XML responses to more complex SOAP messaging defined by a language called WSDL. Even formerly complex standards are migrating toward simple, easily integrated Web services, such as z39.50 moving to SRU.

The new network platform is starting to erase the line between the Web and desktop software and become the foundation on which developers create software.

O’Reilly says that the Internet as the platform is the sum of all connected computers and devices. True Internet applications can be thought of as software above the level of a single device, he says, where applications run not on any individual computer but on the network that connects them. Ultimately, the network ties together all those devices into a single vast computer.

WHY IS TECHNOLOGY MOVING IN THIS DIRECTION?

Using the Web as a platform boosts creativity and speeds application development by removing redundancy in the coding process; there is less duplication among software engineers and more innovation brought to the market faster.

It also reduces costs. Companies and organizations don’t build software from scratch. They create applications that build on top of other applications. In addition, the modular approach based on a shared network platform simplifies complex processes and technologies, resulting in low-cost, reusable components.

In addition, platform services create additional capacity for organizations far beyond what they could create themselves.

But perhaps the most unique aspect of this trend is its business implications: the technology has enabled business reuse. With Web services, organizations can inherit another organization’s successful business model and insert it into their own applications. Previous code reuse models have essentially failed because they lacked this key component.

GETTING THE AMAZON, EBAY EDGE

Amazon was one of the first companies to use the Web as a development platform and open up its technology for other organizations to use and build services on. Through its Web services, Amazon exposes its content and e-commerce tools to software developers and Web site owners, allowing them to leverage the data and functionality that Amazon uses to power their own e-commerce services. As a result, about 1 million businesses with more than 140,000 developers are building innovative applications by mixing their software applications with Amazon’s.

Among the Amazon functionality that other organizations use: product information, images, pricing, search function, shopping cart and inventory management.

eBay is another example of an organization using the network as a platform. The online auction king has been expanding its impact by essentially turning its Web site into a platform. The auction site’s developer section gives soup-to-nuts information about deploying eBay Web services that allow developers to communicate directly with the eBay database and build custom interfaces, functionality and specialized operations not otherwise afforded by the eBay interface.

eBay offers more than 100 Web services to developers to build applications that can connect to those services. They include pricing information, buy-it-now features and payment options through its PayPal subsidiary.

With a mix of on-demand computing solutions and Web services, Salesforce.com provides a network-level platform for salespeople to use for partner relationship management, sales force automation, marketing and customer service. Users plug in and subscribe to services built on the company’s infrastructure, as well as extend its functionality by creating new applications on top of the platform.

More than 444,000 subscribers at 22,700 companies worldwide use Salesforce.com hosted online services and Web services to manage their sales, marketing and customer center operations.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR LIBRARIES?

In the 1970s, libraries moved cataloging and interlibrary loan to the network level with OCLC online services, in which libraries combine to create value that could not be achieved at the institutional level. The community is exploring how to do this with virtual reference in QuestionPoint. The challenge moving forward is to identify other places where libraries will benefit from this model, says Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC Vice President, Research and Chief Strategist.

“What has happened is that the network has come ‘inside,’ it has entered our experiences,” Dempsey says. “It has changed forever what is possible. It is the medium which realizes workflow and process and it requires a different way of thinking and working.”

Dempsey says that many of the issues facing libraries are about working in pre-network environments where things are done many times, redundantly and in fragmented ways. Think of metasearch, he says, where the fragmentation caused by legacy technology and business practices is inefficient and ineffective. Google Scholar is one approach to moving this issue to the network level.

“Things are moving up, moving to the network level. This is the burden of the long tail argument; it is at the root of many of the major forces which are changing our world.”

In the new network environment, libraries need to identify services that go beyond a single institution and remove redundancy, build capacity and allow for collective activity. Think about preservation, storage, tools for analysis, reformatting, transformation, data curation—even a storage framework and logistical network for physical collections, Dempsey says. It simply does not make sense to tackle these with institution-level development. It is expensive and functionally suboptimal.

“We need to move common solutions to the network level, allowing libraries to concentrate on creating local value for their students and scholars rather than redundantly working on everyone’s problems.”

Gregg Silvis, Assistant Director for Library Computing Systems, University of Delaware Library, agrees that removing redundancy is important to financially strapped libraries and a huge incentive to opt for network-level services. He cites the library catalog as a prime example of how the Web platform could be used to reduce costs and serve users better.

“Local OPACs have served a purpose but if I were designing an information discovery system today there would be no local catalog,” he says. “OPACs represent a tremendous duplication of effort.” Silvis says that his library would be better served using a network-based database with links to local acquisitions and circulation systems.

To him, the issue is delivering library services to the point of need. “We have to start thinking about the library in the user environment rather than the user in the library environment. You have to come to the OPAC to use it. The Web allows libraries to offer services where users are.”

Silvis says that Open WorldCat is a good example. This service puts library resources on the Web—where most users are these days—and allows his users to search Google to find things in his library. He also noted that the library’s ArticleExpress service does the same thing by meeting users on the Web and linking them to library-supplied eJournals, eBooks and other content.

Clearly, it is a new computing environment Silvis says that requires change. “What it means to me is we have to break our services into little discrete pieces that we can insert where the users are.”

“This is the general direction in which libraries have to move to maintain their relevance for users. However, it represents a fundamental shift in librarian thinking. Librarians had become used to, and actually expected, the user to come to them. This is clearly no longer the case. Librarians and the resources and the services that they provide to their users must go to the user.”

To O’Reilly, one of the founding fathers of the network platform, the organizations that succeed in this new computing environment are those that deeply understand what it means to be network applications. “It’s as simple as this. The secret in the networked era is to create or leverage network effects, by which networks grow as a result of the connections they make.”

Updates | Sam Holman