I welcome an initiative that is going to look hard at what *users* (e.g. students and researchers etc) want and need from their ‘library systems’. From *their* perspective of course Google is a library system (it has search, it has content and it delivers) and Google itself clearly defines itself a library company in its mission statement.

Open Source adds another dimension of course and comes with a further set of issues. Reading the project description it seems that a SOA approach is just as important perhaps as Open Source. This indicates that one of the keys is getting *interoperable* systems (or a set of interoperable ’services’). This seems to me to be the death knell of monolithic library system silos—which actually some Open Source systems seems to replicate. (Why doesn’t Koha circulation interoperate with Evergreen cataloguing for example?)

Of course, as we have seen in other domains, Open Source doesn’t mean non-commercial and some commercial vendors (e.g. Talis in the UK) are themselves advocating Open Source and moving to more open systems (and data). The old ‘closed source’ vendor world is opening up, more I suspect to compete with the wider world of Google et al than Open Source per se. So as we might expect they are doing their own work on the future of library systems. Ex Libris have been most public here with their talk of a ‘Unified Resource Management’ (URM) system.’ (This is most recently described along with their ‘Open Platform’ initiative in a blog from K-State Libraries (US).

We are in a period of disruptive change and I see that ‘conventional’ libraries (and therefore their system vendors) coming under increasing competition from alternative solutions from outside the domain. (Google is just the most high profile example). I’d like to see the domain as a whole working together. I suggest that the OLE project works with the Library Management Systems LMS (ILS in US parlance) vendors. There must be much overlap between what the OLE project is doing and the work on a URM.

In the UK I’m working on a project (called ‘TILE’) sponsored by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and SCONUL (Society of College National and University Libraries) to look at how, in Higher Education, aggregated information about ‘context’ (course, module, year etc), intentional data (as manifest for example in clickstreams), and user generated content (ratings, reviews, tags etc) can be used to deliver better services (such as recommender services) to the end users. We’d be more than happy to share this with OLE.