OLE Scope Outline – Draft 5.13.09

Vision

The Online Library Environment (OLE) project will develop a flexible, adaptable, and community-driven software framework to manage libraries that support research, teaching, and higher learning. [1] The OLE framework provides processes for acquiring, describing, managing, and delivering information and transforms those processes to deliver services and resources in new ways that are ergonomic and adaptable and that integrate naturally with users’ evolving research, teaching and learning practices. OLE raises the library’s information management processes to the enterprise level and integrates them into the academic and administrative cyberinfrastructure.

OLE complements human interactions, reducing repetitive clerical and administrative tasks and freeing staff to work with scholars and learners. OLE provides scalable support for users and information assets, offering high levels of service at low incremental cost to an expanding clientele working in a growing universe of content-rich resources and services.

Why OLE Now?

Scholarly communication is at a crossroads between traditional models of publishing and new models that encourage peer-to-peer sharing.  At the same time, the roles of instructors and students are changing within a more collaborative teaching and learning environment.  To date, libraries have been outside of these changes while observing much duplication of effort; libraries see value in injecting services into these new modes. In order to remain relevant to users, libraries need to be flexible, adaptable and efficient.

Existing library systems are not development platforms for the future. They were designed around the methods and business processes of print, and they lack the flexibility to go beyond those print-oriented processes. Consequently, these systems address an increasingly small slice of today’s library needs.

Collaborative collections and partnerships are increasingly vital to the mission of libraries, both economically and strategically. A library’s technology must support its role as a member of a network of collaborating institutions.

Libraries also exist as part of a wider enterprise within the institutions that host them. The technology that underlies the business processes of the library and the institution must be efficient and flexible. Libraries must maximize the use of other campus information systems, such as identity management and accounts payable/receivable, rather than replicate those functions within library systems.  Additionally, libraries that are well integrated with institutional business processes can better help the scholarly and research communities with their information management needs.

These challenges are addressed with the development of the OLE framework.

Principles

Principles that underlie the OLE framework are:

Flexibility: Supports a wide range of resources; accessed by a wide range of customers in a variety of contexts; provides structures for extending and adding new types of resources, customers and contexts.

Community ownership: Designed, built, owned, and governed by and for the library community on an open source licensing basis; sustained by the community with the assistance of a thriving vendor marketplace; evolves over time through transparent processes that enable and respond to input and innovation from the community.

Service Orientation: Developed using the methods of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and implemented with Web Services to be a modular and technology-neutral framework that ensures the interoperability of library business systems and accommodates a diversity of solutions without the risks posed by single-source providers; can be customized to support local needs.

Enterprise-Level Integration: Designed to adapt to and integrate with other enterprise systems such as research support, student information, human resources, identity management, fiscal control, and repository and content management.

Efficiency: Provides a modular application infrastructure that integrates with new and existing academic and research technologies and business processes for improved efficiency and effectiveness of the institution; meets current and future business needs of the community.

Sustainability: Creates a reliable and robust framework to identify, document, innovate, develop, maintain, and review the software necessary to further the operation and mission of libraries.

Functional Scope

The OLE Project intends to design and deploy a reference implementation that supports the basic functionality of current ILS systems. However, OLE supports functional capabilities that are beyond the existing ILS core by developing a service orientation for information management. We expect the Project’s functional scope to expand and evolve in step with emerging business practices, service requirements, and content offerings of libraries, universities and research institutions. Thus OLE broadens the current notion of the ILS to directly support or integrate with systems that manage intellectual property and rights, build and maintain content repositories, link content with learning management technologies, facilitate customer authentication and authorization, manage client relationships, and integrate with institution-wide financial services. Moreover, OLE will encompass support for consortial applications of information management, as well as the means of facilitating inter-institutional cooperative programs, resource sharing, and integration with external data and registry services.

Architecture

SOA-Based, Orchestrated Environment

The Open Library Environment will be developed using service orientation. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) defines a service taxonomy that provides the building blocks that are orchestrated to fulfill business functionality. The community-developed model of OLE will use SOA principles to enhance interoperability at the enterprise level.

The Abstract Reference Model for OLE shows the relationship between OLE middleware, OLE components, entities acted on by OLE, and third-party components, such as Identity Management, Institutional Repositories, and Course Management Systems.

The National Library of Australia Services Framework has developed an inventory of services necessary to conduct library business. Taking that framework as a point of departure, the OLE Design Team is building an OLE service taxonomy (coming soon) to efficiently fulfill community-defined business processes. This service taxonomy is intentionally incomplete; it is our expectation that the OLE Build Team will complete the full service taxonomy.

The business process model of orchestration demonstrates how the OLE framework uses the service taxonomy and service bus to provide library functionality by reusing the same services to produce two different processes.  We will soon provide explicit models that demonstrate this capability.

Services Framework

The Open Library Environment is a services framework that can be differentiated from an integrated library system or a collection of information management silos. This services framework consists of a Workflow Engine and a Rules/Policy Engine. The Workflow Engine is infrastructural middleware meant to manage modeled business processes; the Rules/Policy engine modifies workflows defined by local policies.

Services

Web services are a dominant method of the SOA implementation in OLE. Services are the well-defined, reusable building blocks used to assemble well-ordered information management and library business processes. Since processes are loosely coupled, new processes can be added without disrupting other processes, and existing processes can be reorchestrated to discover new values and economies.

Enterprise-Level Services

The Open Library Environment seeks to improve enterprises productivity and efficiency in information management by reducing redundancy in ERP, identity management, institutional repository, course management, student-customer relationship management, research administration, and unified communications systems. It is appropriate that OLE is implemented and managed at the enterprise level for performance, scalability, and robustness.

Focus on Business Process

A complete Open Library Environment service taxonomy enables new methods of developing processes without disrupting current workflows. This frees staff from routine operations and increases capacity for innovation within the library, the institution or partnership, and the scholarly community.

Governance

A governance organization will be established to provide a stable OLE presence to make community and local development and innovation possible. The governance organization will:

• provide a financial support model to sustain ongoing development;
• institute a framework to accommodate new development and incorporate changes into the core project;
• manage communications between partners and external groups;
• establish principles and guidelines for how developers will engage with the software;
• maintain and protect the intellectual property developed under the project’s auspices.

The OLE Project will join an existing 501c3 not-for-profit organization that can provide the necessary administrative governance support.  These important administrative duties are critical to maintaining a 501c3 not-for-profit status with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and must be done by individuals who have experience in this venue. Another critical aspect of any 501c3 organization is licensing and protection of the intellectual property of the open source projects that are part of its organizational structure. The model for this type of umbrella organization is the Apache Foundation. Partners in an OLE Build Project will want to retain community governance over the software code in order to assure long-term sustainability and success and to provide accountability and quality assurance for the OLE software code.

The OLE Design Team determined that the Kuali Foundation, which directly supports administrative community source software projects in the higher education, would be the best such umbrella organization.  The Kuali Foundation was designed as a lightweight administrative organization, and it can provide administrative functions for OLE at a fraction of the cost of building an entirely new entity. In addition, the SOA middleware that Kuali has developed will likely play an important role in the OLE Build Project.

The Kuali Foundation’s governance template would create a charter for the OLE software community that sets forth the project’s mission, objectives, timeline, and partners. It would also create an independent community governing board from invested institutions that would serve as the direct connection to the Kuali Foundation and as the public face of the Kuali OLE community.

How Governance will be implemented

During the initial phase of the build project, governance will focus on codifying the relationships of tier-one and tier-two build partners with one another and with the early adopter community to ensure a solid foundation of policy and practice for administering the OLE code and documentation base. Governance will also focus on integrating policy and practice for the OLE code and for membership tiers and roles with prevailing practices already established in Kuali; the goal will be to recognize the library community’s unique needs while realizing the benefits, including economies of scale, that are possible from integration with a mature Kuali governance structure.

Codifying policy and practice includes such areas as intellectual property administration, best practices, accountability, transparency of code development and dissemination, and the development of code release and propagation practices. Another core activity will be to develop an ongoing sustainability model, drawing upon the Kuali membership tiers, that involves a wide range of user organizations in sharing both authority and accountability for ongoing governance of the OLE code.

Governance will initially be implemented through Memoranda of Intent (MOI) among tier-one and tier-two participants in the Kuali build project. These MOIs will commit the participants to developing and submitting a build proposal to the funding body, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. They will also commit the participants to financial and in-kind contributions to the project. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), signed by each participant, will define the role of each tier-one and tier-two participant and establish the financial and in-kind commitments for each institution as articulated in the build proposal accepted and approved by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

An important component of the OLE Build Project will be to develop a governance and sustainability model that builds on the experiences and practices of the Kuali governance project to develop tiered membership for early adopters of the software. The tiers represent levels of commitment and active engagement, ranging from developers to committers to adopters; they ensure that all participating members have a voice in developing, maintaining and propagating the code.

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For the purpose of this document, the term “libraries” generally refers to libraries within higher education institutions as well as libraries charged with national or federal responsibilities. The techniques and tools of the OLE Project can be used by other libraries with similar enterprise application needs.

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