SOA What is the Elf telling us
Library Elf, the Track your library books service has been around for a long while now. The Internet Archive’s WaybackMachine tracks it back to June 2004. It is a simple service which sends you emails to let you know when your reserved items are available, and your books are due for return. It also does this via RSS, and has other additional features.
A service that is continuing to be successful after three years is telling us something. Something that Talis Project Bluebird told us - library users find alerts about events in their library account valuable, especially if those alerts can enter their normal workflow via email or RSS.
It is also telling us that the the ILS/LMS suppliers have not been satisfying this need very well so far.
Library Elf seems to come up in conversation at regular intervals, as it gets discovered by someone new. Anecdotal evidence from these conversations tells me much about the attitude of system vendors to services like the Elf, which consume data from their products. These attitudes vary from ours which is probably best summarized as admiration for the Elf guys’ ability to be able to screen-scrape the Talis Prism user interface, coupled with a hope that future Prism upgrades won’t brake it for them - to others which can be summarized as anything that sucks data out of our system without authorization from us, breaks agreements we have with our customers and should not be allowed.
Ok to be fair to support teams everywhere, they can not be expected to support their system being accessed by external services over which they have no control, in a way that their user interface was not designed to be accessed - but hey, if it works and adds value to the library, and for their users, in a way that the system as yet does not, why not. With the usual caveats about not being shocked if it stops working after a software upgrade I would not discourage anyone to look at a service like Library Elf.
The success of Library Elf, despite the difficulty of accessing library systems, tells us something else. What if it was easy, and consistent across vendors, to access services that provided this sort of data? To do this you need a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and systems designed to be part of it.
For an overview of SOA in Libraries, I can highly recommend the five part series of posts by Eric Schnell on Service-Oriented Library Systems (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) - even if he did spell my name wrong in the resource list, when pointing to one of my previous posts on this, at the end of the fifth one.
August 15th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Sorry about the misspelling, Richard. I knew a Richard Wallace in a previous life. Thanks for pointing it out. It was an easy edit.