Last week I posted a response to John Blyberg’s ‘An ILS Customer Bill-of-Rights’. His posting was partially stimulated by Michael Stephens’ musing over at ALA Techsource ‘Do Libraries Matter: On Library & Librarian 2.0’ which in turn was calling attention to the Do Libraries Matter? The Rise of Library 2.0 whitepaper published by Ken Chad and Paul Miller here at Talis. (who was it said that the Internet was making the world smaller and more connected?).

Anyway, I’m now going to make life even more complex by responding to John’s response to my response to his Bill-of-rights.

I empathize with what is driving the needs that he expresses forcefully in his original posting. We both agree Libraries matter, and from John’s point of view especially the one in Ann Arbor. He is doing all he can, and much more than many, to make that library’s services and web presence matter more than I expect his local citizens thought it could. He should be proud of his results so far. But like all good enthusiasts he is not resting on his laurels, and is expressing understandable frustration in how the ILS is holding him back.

In his response John says “This does not’t give enough credit to those of us who hack away on these systems every day. We’ll figure it out.” Looking at the issue from John’s end of the telescope it sounds so obvious and simple. Imagine looking at it from as a support analyst’s point of view. From her end of the telescope she can see [in Talis’ case] potentially 100+ Johns hacking away on their systems every day – a thought to drive you straight toward the caffeine in the morning!

As I admitted in my last post, I’ve been around at Talis for some 15 years, and in that time have gained notoriety as also coming from the hacking wing of the programming fraternity, unjustified I must add – well I would say that wouldn’t I ;-}. So I share his frustration in the amount of time it takes to see great new things evolve in to an ILS product line. Knowing the vast amount of energy and effort that goes in to the testing and quality assurance of the complex beast that is an ILS, that frustration has been tempered over the years with understanding. Perhaps that’s why I find myself in the Research Team where ‘continuous beta’ is a more acceptable concept.

Here we go again, I here you cry, an ILS vendor trying to justify the status quo. Up to a couple of years ago I would have agreed with you, because that’s mostly just the way it was. The development and support needed to provide an ILS that was capable of being relied upon by 100’s of academic and public libraries, predicated the customer vendor relationship we are now used to.

Read Paul & Ken’s whitepaper and you will see that we at Talis, believe that things are due for a change, and not a small one; If Libraries are to continue to matter, which we believe they must. We Libraries, librarians, ILS & other system vendors, we will have to embrace and promote that change. Library 2.0 is not just some RSS, Wiki, Blog, and enrichment, sticking plasters on top of an unchanged ILS. It is a revamping of the whole architecture to get those nice to haves, and make it easy to add so so much more.

John is a little skeptical of my hope that “eventually we will be able to run an ILS appliance (a bit like the Google appliance) where you don’t know, or care, what OS or database is under the hood.” He is of the opinion that appliances “tend to be locked into a very narrow and rigid functional spectrum.”.

That is exactly what the core of an ILS should be. They all acquire, catalog, enable search of, and circulate items. What should be non-rigid about that? But I want mine to do things differently to the next library. Quite right too, but are those things really ‘core’? You want your OPAC to differentiate your Library; you want your users’ account information to appear in their favorite portal; you want to communicate with your customers by email, RSS, SMS Text, IM, etc.; if all the core functionality was available via a software service you could – and would you care how and on what it ran? I think not.

Is that to say that this will happen overnight, definitely not. Library 2.0 as a term is less than a month old. Web 2.0 and the technologies and different thoughts behind it are mostly only months old. This period reminds me of 1995 when the first Web OPACs were appearing. Who would have predicted RSS searching then? The only difference is that things are moving much much faster this time around. Web service enabling ILSs, and the world they operate in, will take longer than we would all like, but when ubiquitous access to them becomes the norm, don’t stand in the way you will get run over.

This posting is getting excessively long so I’ll finish by answering a couple of John’s direct questions/challenges:

“I can’t think of a case in which running SELECT statements against a RDBMS would be dangerous under any conditions.” Any SELECT which causes a substantial slow down in the performance of your ILS is dangerous for the reputation of your Library. Are you sure that all the bespoke work you do against your database is scalable, (eg RSS feeds) when used by the majority of you customers. How many RSS readers, polling every hour, can you support ? What happens when an upgrade to your ILS changes the shape and performance characteristics of your system?

“Richard didn’t directly address my assertion that we should have administrative control over the servers.” John’s points on this are very valid, but if/when the system does go down and a call has to be placed to the ILS Vendor support team how much more efficient will that team be if they are supporting systems of similar OS, database, and configuration, than they would be if everyone was different (and with respect not run by people as agile, enthusiastic, and capable as those at Ann Arbor).

As John says it looks like Talis is listening. We are doing much more than just listening, it is exciting times and we are passionate in our belief that Libraries do matter, and the new wave of technologies will enable them to matter even more in the future, not less.