ILS Symposium: Art Rhyno, University of Windsor
The Trip so Far – a Journey with the ILS, Art Rhyno
- ILS has it’s roots back to 1948, but it came together in the 60s.
- the ILS has gotten quite complex, but the ecosystem hasn’t evolved with it
- we’re an edge market, we don’t get a lot of attention – not a lot of hands working on building us good systems
- at the same time, user expectations are at an all time high
- what makes something good at inventory control, does not make it a good UI
- if you look at enterprise systems, they tend to be plug and play
- Art wrote an article in 2001 called The End of the Integrated Library System – didn’t happen then
- In the book Guns, Germs & Steel, the author argues that technologies never work the first time
- now there are so many high quality open source products and the ecosystem has caught up with the software
- there are hybrid models – e.g. very few vendors recognize that they don’t need to build their own web servers or databases – they get them from someone else. There are more open source components creeping into the system – great possibility to mix & match.
How does IT work now?
- we don’t have a lot of great metrics
- there’s a lot of tinkering and a lot is based on broad statements
- it’s elusive, changes constantly
2 New Building Blocks that might fit into the ILS
- we think of the web server and relational databases as part of the ILS at the moment
ERP system (enterprise resource planning) – JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, etc.
- considered some of the most complex systems built
- late to the open source game – only 5 out there
- Ofbiz: an open source ERP.
- just making its way through the Apache incubator process (apache is the gold standard for open source projects)
- this could be a profound building block for us
Lucene
- state of the art indexing
- open source toolkit
- this could be the basis of a common index format
- could be a piece of the ILS landscape soon
Where should we be at the end of today? From the audience:
- A manifesto!
- We’ve been pretty vocal about our unhappiness with the ILS: where’s the action after this? a working group? a discussion list? how do we take this forward? should we create something new?
- Practical hooks for interoperability with other systems
- A way to keep the discussion going and build collaborations and partnerships
- Some discussion on where do we go with a practical approach. What practical advice can we give to our vendors?
- Engage the skeptics on the issue of open source options (skepticism has been the default position on an open source ILS).
- How do we make the people who deal with the patrons and the user experience partners in this?
- How do we set a direction for the future given that We Are Not Happy with what we’ve got?! (amen!)
- When we pay to have things done, how can we make sure that other people/libraries can also benefit from that?
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