It looks like Scotland is biting the bullet on a national smartcard scheme and it’s good to see the Scottish Executive putting a strong emphasis on libraries. This is no doubt because of the influence of SLIC who recently invited the ILS vendors active in Scotland to a meeting to discuss a plan to implement smartcards across all 32 Scottish local authorities. This builds on the experience of existing Scottish smartcard schemes and also projects in England and Europe. The plan is to issue people with a smartcard that can be used across multiple services including libraries and also transport. Certainly our experience is that access to multiple services is a key factor in the success of any smartcard scheme.

For me one of the most interesting opportunities is the possibility that the smartcard will enable library members from one local authority to access easily libraries and library resources from another. Ultimately this may extend to include academic libraries. There is also an ambition to use the card to provide discovery and fulfilment beyond traditional library collections to access, for example, digital content which is currently licensed, for the most part, to academic libraries. This sows the seeds for a truly national library service.

Talis has an innovative track record in smartcard implementations. The real issue it seems to me it not so much how the ILS will “read” the smartcard but how “borrower” information in the library system is integrated with the “citizen “data in the smartcard systems (for example a local authority CRM system). Talis Project Keystone uses modern “Web services” as part of service oriented architecture (SOA) to deliver interoperability between an ILS and other “corporate” systems. This dynamic interoperability will be a prerequisite to enabling “borrowers” to have their smartcard authenticated automatically at any library or over the Web.

Once people are able to use libraries throughout Scotland then the need for a genuine national resource discovery, sharing and fulfilment infrastructure becomes even more pressing. SLIC and other bodies in Scotland like the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) are doing a lot of great work here already ( e.g. SPEIR -Portal , CAIRNS – library catalogues and SCONE -collections ). However grant-funded public sector solutions are not the only way forward. There is much opportunity for genuine collaboration between the public and private sectors. Talis is a major stakeholder with our UnityWeb and Talis Base services. UnityWeb is used by over 60% of the public libraries in Scotland (and the UK) and Talis Base provides catalogue data to around a quarter of the UK’s public and university libraries. The focus for our next Talis Research Day on 21st September will be “next generation” resource discovery, sharing and fulfilment. We will be using Web 2.0 technologies to deliver a rich user experience where and when the user needs it and a platform on which we will create the next generation of Talis Base and UnityWeb applications. This is project “Skywalk” and we’ll be talking about this to a wider audience at out Talis Insight conference in November