ILS Symosium: closing panel Q & A
For the Evergreen developers: What are you doing with your acquisitions module?
- will do focus groups again to ask what works, what doesn’t, what do you like about systems you’ve used, what don’t you like, etc.
Mellon grants to help with these developments – are the Evergreen folks aware of this?
- one thing that Mellon is doing is gave some seed funding to the U of Rochester to develop their ILS & focus on user interface aspects
- Rochester: a pilot to investigate the feasibility of an extensible catalogue – dumps from the catalogue, harvesting from OAI sources, and bringing all that into an index/database and providing a front-end that includes social computing components; thinking of using Lucene for the indexing.
What does the panel think are the next 2-3 steps that the library development community can take to see some of these ideas come to fruition?
- Art Rhyno (Windsor): look at some of the measures used in the open source arena to identify good software projects (Apache foundation); we need a forum to talk to each other more (listserv? involve associations? IFLA?); how do we bring in everyone from the US, Canada, academic, public sectors, etc.
- Mike Rylander (PINES): more involvement from the library community out to the wider world to drive technology standards; library standards are good but limited – Z39.50 is good but not a lot of people want to implement it because it can’t form the basis of innovation, also SRU/SRW are good but the specs are very hard to read; pushing ideas out into the larger development world is good because it will inform rigourous standards; libraries shouldn’t do what they don’t know how to do as far as development goes, so we need to try hard to pull people (and standards) into our development community.
- David Singleton (PINES): if you build it, they will come. If we build this open source ILS, the community will come. The community has to come because that’s what’s needed to make it sustainable (they always said that they didnt want Evergreen to be born, to grow, and to die in Georgie – they always wanted it to spread!).
- Brad LaJeunesse (PINES): technologies in libraries have grown and become more integrated; tech staff need to be involved in every part of the library operation; technology is part of everything we do so we can’t put it in a corner and leave it to a vendor.
- Peter Murray (OhioLINK): the coalescing of expertise across our institutional boundaries; one institution alone can’t see the development of a system like this, we’ve lost individually and collectively the ability to control our own destiny; but there’s a great deal of expertise across our development community (converge in code4lib, hackfest, etc.); the 80-20 rule applies – 80% of all we do is the same (across institutions) so we need to pull together and take a holistic view of what we want to do & where we want to go.
- Alan Darnell (Scholars Portal): moving forward does require an understanding of the past, so as we move forward we need to remember why we did the things we did in the past (rather than thinking we need to start from scratch and begin anew); know our users, what functionality they want, how they use our stuff; know our content, understand what we have, what its value and purpose is and how it can be used; a business case across institutions to look at how much we’re paying for our ILSs and what we could do if we got together
Do you have anything additional to say to directors and senior managers in the audience? What else can we do to help this process along?
- need “blessings” & support from senior managers to forge ahead!
- these sorts of developments need to rank high on the list of priorities
- dialogue! make it OK to talk about open source and what it is (& what it is not)
- creating a culture of innovation in the library – innovation that allows the library to be flexible, respond to user needs, to respond to changes in technology
- take risks!
- when budgets are tight & times are tough, groups can work together to come up with creative solutions; there’s an opportunity at the director level for directors to get together, save money, take a bold step, and take risks! (Scholars Portal has done this for college & university libraries in Ontario).
Question from the panel: What can developers do to assist directors to sell these projects at higher levels? To make them sustainable, etc.?
- briefings about the project in layman’s terms so that directors can take that and use it on their supervisors!
- look at the emotional and rational components of projects (skills sets, soft skills, etc.) because often people’s reluctance to accept technology is fear
What kinds of things would you say to vendors about their current business models? To stay relevant? To remain as partners?
- add value or you’re irrelevant
- add value without breaking standards
- get on board with strict standards compliance (not compliance to a point)
- a new service model: vendors providing commercial support for open source software (like Red Hat does with Linux; LibLime does with Koha).
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