One of the joys of watching and commenting on technology is the great sport of new acronym spotting. Only rivaled in its field by new acronym inventing. Lately there has been a small series of acronyms forming with the suffix ‘aaS’.

First we had SaaS - Software as a Service. To quote Wikipedia Software as a Service (SaaS) is a model of software delivery where the software company provides maintenance, daily technical operation, and support for the software provided to their client. SaaS is a model of software delivery rather than a market segment; software can be delivered using this method to any market segment including home consumers, small business, medium and large business. The best know example of SaaS being Salesforce.com In simple terms, Salesforce’s business is based upon companies large and small renting a CRM system as a service over the Internet. For the customer this means no investment in hardware or software or the associated overheads - they just get on and use it

Following Amazon’s announcement of their Electronic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, where you can rent time as and when you need it on a virtual computer for as little as 10 cents an hour, Jeff Barr (Amazon Web Services Evangelist) coined the term Hardware as a Service (HaaS). In the presentation I first saw Jeff use the term, he also talked about the Amazon Mechanical Turk service. Mechanical Turk is a way of interacting with people to get done things that only humans can do such as image recognition, sheep drawing, and the like. This got me to thinking that this was really People as a Service - PaaS.

Well now, following an announcement from Medialab, the Dutch company behind Aquabrowser, we have OaaS - OPAC as a Service. This may be stretching the point a little as what they are proposing to deliver could be described as providing OPACs using a SaaS technique and business model, but if others agree that OaaS is a god acronym I would like to stake my claim to its creation.

The announcement of AquaBrowser OnLine is featured in Library Technology Guides. From the AquaBrowser OnLine site:

AquaBrowser Online is a unique web based library catalog search service. All your library needs is an Internet browser. Without any investment in software or servers, this is a whole new paradigm in library search solutions.

and

AquaBrowser Online brings the best features from AquaBrowser Library to the budget conscious libraries with up to 150.000 titles in their catalogs. No longer will smaller libraries have to compromise their wishes on search and web-accessibility.

So let the guys from AquaBrowser Online have access to index your catalog, and you can have a new whizzo OPAC interface for as little as $99/month. All without having to jump through all the usual hoops of justifying the purchase of hardware and software to run it on.

This is not the first example of being able to obtain some/all of your library via a service, but it is a high profile one. Building on their reputation of providing new OPAC interfaces for old monolithic Library Systems, or to echo Roy Tennant’s words putting lipstick on pigs, this initiative may gain some traction.

A Library wishing to dip it’s toe in this water will be probably be taking a low risk decision. No hardware investment, they are not committing their whole Library Service to this as yet untested option, if they don’t like it they can pull out and go back to what they are doing now, or even move on to other OaaS solutions that undoubtedly will appear in the future.

I note that there is currently a limit of 150,000 titles (at $256/month) it would be interesting to see how this could/would be scaled for larger systems.

Back in April I predicted [again] that the future of the monolithic library system was uncertain. The Library System of the future would consist of many specialized components loosely coupled by Web Services to deliver a whole solution relevant to a specific library’s requirements. Joining some early shoots in this very different way of providing and purchasing the technology to run your library AquaBrowser Online will be very interesting to watch as it moves form announcement through to a live service.

Even the most casual reader of the TDN, and this blog will know that here at Talis we are convinced that this sort of approach to delivering library services and software is the way forward. So much so that it is benefiting us and our customers in everything that we do. No matter how certain that you are in something, it is always gratifying to see others who also ‘get it’. We will be watching AquaBrowser Online with great interest.

(Waiter photo taken by vanillasky displayed in Flickr)

Technorati Tags: Talis, Talis Platform, Cataloging, Library, Library 2.0, Web 2.0, SaaS, Aquabrowser

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