In the next several days I hope we will have some more published guidelines about how others can join and participate in a more official capacity, although those parameters may not address NISO’s more specific expression of support. But, again, I appreciate you input here and we look forward to working with you.

I will be following your work closely and mentioning it in our community whenever appropriate.

Good luck with your work.

We have indeed given consideration to working with current open source systems and are not excluding any product that works within a design framework. Our outcome, or deliverable, will be a design framework. If that spawns building from scratch, that will be a different phase.

Our initial efforts are to clearly articulate needs of an open source framework that meets the evolving business and process needs of a modern research library. These needs go beyond what print-resource-based ILS products currently manage.

As with other available products, we are very interested in understanding and developing the necessary community characteristics that yield adoption of enterprise software in research libraries and their parent institutions.

This approach will emphasize functionality that is not currently available. And while moving forward is our goal, we understand there are legacy needs that must also be addressed. Nonetheless we seek innovations in an ILS toolset, not all of those innovations are available in current open source projects. In other words, we believe there is work to be done and we believe the OLE Project significantly addresses a need.

I’d be delighted if you choose to join us.