This is a very interesting project. I believe that a new library system (open source based) should integrate both the work flow of analogical and digital material, and should be designed taking in to account the new collaborative environment of the information world.
It also should be flexible in order integrate new features, keeping in mind that we are still in a transitional period. A EUI Library (Florence, we are working in defining and updating work flows, and in finding a way to integrate new modules like Millennium ERM, Webbrige and other tools/services like Serial solution ecc.
During my long practice in the field I experimented that the must important library systems on the marked are conceived taking in to account exclusively the Anglo-American library context. This seemed obvious for many reasons of cultural and economic nature; but libraries in many countries experimented many difficulties with this approach. The library and information world is changing and expanding significantly i the last few years. I thing that the new systems has to be enough open in order to respond effectively to different approaches and needs.
I should glad to contribute to these developments, if possible

thanks

Dear Tommaso
I will be at the University of Parma doing research on the internationalisation of education for LIS from October to December. I wonder if we could meet sometime, perhaps in Firenze, while I am there. I am very interested in your comments regarding the designs of most ILS being predicated upon Anglo-American understandings.
All the best
S

This is certainly not a criticism of this excellent initiative, but rather than building an entirely new system, have the project members considered adding functionality to an existing open-source ILS like Koha? I’d be interested in knowing more about “what’s missing”.

Recently, I have heard comments from users of several of the major commercial ILS. There seems to be a general desire for a simplified (and unifying, seamless, media transparent) interface for the public, but also for improved management capabilities for staff….

cbs

My previous comment last week seemed to be zapped by including URLs, so I am resubmitting it without links. Everything I mention is easy to find. Two existing projects to look at for this are Jangle and OpenSRF. Some major projects, such as VuFind, have endorsed Jangle, and OpenSRF’s home in the Evergreen ILS stack ensures widescale deployment and stability. Both projects are also ingenious for leveraging mainstream and net-savvy plumbing (Atom in the case of Jangle and Jabber in the case of OpenSRF). SOA can carry the same amount of weight that doomed OSI in a previous era in the library world but there may be ways to adopt existing agile approaches to avoid such a fate.

Chris, I think your concerns will be addressed throughout the project. Part of the process of designing a document using SOA is that the system will be modular, so it is possible that we would recommend using one piece from Koha, another from Evergreen, and so on.

One of the key motivations of this project is to be able to manage print and electronic collections equally, and for the most part, Koha and Evergreen are still based on traditional library systems focusing on print collections.

Keep checking back throughout the academic year. We want to continue conversation with anyone interested throughout the project.

Cheers,
Tim

I welcome an initiative that is going to look hard at what *users* (e.g. students and researchers etc) want and need from their (academic) ‘library systems’. From the users’ 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 key motivations for the project 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 seem to replicate. (Why doesn’t Koha circulation interoperate with Evergreen cataloguing for example? Are they any better than their closed source rivals at integrating with VLE’s, registry and finance systems?)

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 with their talk (at ALA and other venues) of a ‘Unified Resource Management’ (URM) system. (This has been recently described along with the ExLibris ‘Open Platform’ initiative in a blog from K-State Libraries. See http://ksulib.typepad.com/conferences/2008/08/eluna-2008-ex-l.html.)

We are in a period of disruptive change and I see ‘conventional’ libraries (and therefore their system vendors) coming under increasing *competition* from alternative solutions from outside the (traditional library)domain. Google is just the most high profile example. I’d therefore like to see the domain *as a whole* working together. I suggest that the OLE project works with the Library Management System (LMS or ILS in US parlance) vendors. There must be much overlap between what the OLE project is doing and the work on a URM system for example. Aren’t they both trying to achieve similar ends for users?

In the UK I’m working on a relevant project (called ‘TILE’ see http://www.sero.co.uk/jisc-tile.html) sponsored by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and SCONUL (Society of College National and University Libraries). Vendors are included in our ‘reference group’. We are looking 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.My view is that it would be worth exploring how this data can be aggregated and made available (with relevant privacy conecerns addressed) freely for re-use to both social and commercial market provider, whether Open Source or not.

Please look at Customer Relations Management Software ‘CRM Software’ as you assess the environment, one of the biggest lapses in the design of library systems has been with user services as relationship and knowledge base. Looking forward to your seeing what you all develop. Best wishes, Cyril

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