Will Ex Libris Listen….
Will Ex Libris listen to the implicit appeal from Ross Singer in his reply to Ex Libris’ Nancy Dushkin and UCLA’s Andy Kohler’s comments to his posting ‘A proposal to Endeavor Voyager customers‘.
Obviously relieved to hear, but disappointed to hear via a comment to a blog post, that Ex Libris are to continue development of the Voyager system, Ross goes on to indicate that it would be good to be able to get at the the underlying functionality behind the OPAC and to functionality that would support things such as NCIP.
Nancy states that they are continuing to develop Voyager at least up to version 7.0. She also says that they are working on integrating it with Primo and Verde. One would assume then that these will become primary interfaces to the developed Voyager.
As prospective Meridian customers will attest, Ex Libris are not totally against replacing acquired products with its own - in this case Verde.
One would presume, that by integrating it with Primo and Verde, Voyager back office functionally will remain core to be surrounded by user interfaces from the original Ex Libris stable of products.
If this is in fact what the boosted development resources are doing, they have a great opportunity to satisfy the needs and wants of people like Ross. By grafting things like Primo on top of Voyager by creating an open read/write API layer in Voyager they would opening up many opportunities which could extend the life of the core system for many years.
I could just imagine the delight of Ross and his fellows if their next system upgrade not only gives them the Primo interface, but also gives them the open APIs to develop their own interfaces if they would prefer it that way.
So if my assumptions, about the way Ex Libris are doing what I think they are doing, are correct I hope they don’t blow this great opportunity to open up their systems and provide great benefit to their customers.
As regular readers of this blog will know, we at Talis are passionate about the opening up library systems and the data locked within them, regardless of the vendor and for the benefit of all. The sooner Libraries are released from having to use the OPAC they are given with their system, like it or not, the better it will be for all libraries and the users they serve.
(Photo taken by OrangeBeard(less) displayed in Flickr)
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Technorati Tags: Talis, Talis Platform, Ex Libris, Aleph, Library, Voyager
March 11th, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Well, I would be highly surprised if Primo came as the user interface for free, but, yes, this scenario would be the ideal. Since we’ve become a somewhat defacto Ex Libris shop (SFX, Metalib, MARCit!, now Voyager, we’re looking at ERMs — including Verde), the potential synergy between products seems beneficial. What we don’t want, though, is to only get this functionality by purchasing Ex Libris products.
Obviously they are making hooks in Voyager for Verde and Primo, now they need to document them and let us use them however we want. Last year at ELUNA (Ex Libris’ User Group meeting), Oren Beit-Arie talked a lot about using Ex Libris products as middleware (and, indeed, SFX, Metalib and Aleph all have XML interfaces — Verde has SOAP). Now let’s see if that extends to their Endeavor products.