ILS Symposium: Peter Murray, OhioLINK
Could We Do What They Are Doing? Applying the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Model to Libraries, Peter Murray (of the Disruptive Library Technology Jester blog!)
Overview
- How can we apply what works in other industries to our industry?
- What is an SOA? And why should I care?
- What might a library SOA look like?
- Who else is talking about this?
What is an SOA?
- It’s not about a particular programming language, network protocol
- It’s an architecture for designing systems (programming-language agnostic)
- SOA are not about large applications, they are about discrete business processes (ignores the how and focuses on the what)
- It’s not about starting over – throwing away everything you have now and starting afresh (doomed to failure!)
- It’s about reuse of things that we already have now (orchestrating business processes; turn our software inside-out)
- It’s not ONLY about web services – it’s about web services as a means to an end (think of SOA as a blueprint for building something and the web services as the plumbing)
- It’s not about proprietary systems, it’s about standards and open protocols
Why should we care about SOA?
- The ILS market is imploding (marketplace consolidation, new entrants into the market, market leaders gobbling each other up and chasing the highest-end customers; some of the least demanding customers are dropping off and going to smaller automation firms; monolithic do-everything applications that don’t do everything we want; dueling me-too press releases (ERMs at the moment);
- Can we afford not to care? We need to move more nimbly; Service Oriented Architectures for Dummies is coming out! (you know you’ve hit the bigtime when there’s a Dummies book on the topic)
The alternative?
- Orchestrated disintegration: flexible ecosystem of business processes that come together as needed and as defined by us!
What might a library SOA look like?
- Oriented towards services
- As you look at the ecosystem of processes, there’s a consistency to it
- What are the business processes of a traditional ILS? Discovering content, describing content, borrowing physical item, getting new content (acquisitions), etc.
- traditional and non-traditional services for discovering content: search for known item; browse related items; make recommendations; read reviews; browse related items using relevance-ranked filters (long tail stuff); human-mediated description (cataloguing!); our peers are using automated description services (amazon’s statistically improbable phrases and capitalized phrases; shape recognition and colour maps, audio (flickr, etsy, pandora, etc.);
The wifi crapped out on me at this point so I lost all Peter’s great closing notes about who else is talking about SOA in libraries. Thankfully, he’s got his slides online here so check them out for more info.
Next Moscow to St. Petersburg cruise we will take will be in August. | Michael tries to find skilful top forex broker.
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