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6 September 2007
Integration, Integration, Integration
Posted by Richard Wallis at September 6, 2007 12:27 PM
To paraphrase the [previous] British Prime Minister Tony Blair - ask me my three main priorities for libraries and I tell you integration, integration integration.
What has prompted this drift in to politically influenced style of proclamation, you may ask. Andrew Pace, that's who - with his post on Hectic Pace, Interoperability Is a Lie.
"Interoperability is the biggest lie in automation today." The word is thrown around as easily and meaninglessly as "friend." Interoperable is, at best, an adjective for standards-based systems, and at worst, a hack to cover up the fact that different systems are not at all meant to speak to one another. The former case is so rare as to make it the exception; the latter case is perpetual job security for systems people.
Don't get me wrong I agree with him. Interoperability is the enabler of integration - we all want our systems, and parts thereof, to Interoperate so that we can end up with an integrated solution. Not 'integrated' as in the monolithic ILS dinosaurs which inhabit most library data centres , but integrated as in having all the systems that I use, both inside and outside of the library, meaningfully talking together without the intervention of a computing degree and/or lots of Sunday afternoons to waste.
Andrew suggests that standards are fundamental to interoperability. In some cases he is right, but a standard doesn't always lead to interoperability. There are loads of examples of what I mean in the world of libraries. Take good old Z39.50 for instance - talk to anyone running a federated search engine and you will soon discover that some things stretch the meaning of the word standard. Then there is Z39.50's cousin NCIP, don't start me on that! Of course there is the ILS vendor who boasts industry-standard APIs - the 'industry' of organizations that have purchased their system that is.
You may think that from this that I am anti standards - far from it. I am very pro standards, but standards at the right level. Industry wide standards, where by 'industry' I mean computing, Internet, or Web. In my recent Talking with Talis podcast interview with the Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation, Peter Brantley said [the functions of an Integrated Library System] will be desegregated - unbundled - so that there will be more capacity to choose light-weight versions of these things that can talk to each other on a more services oriented basis through APIs.
What Peter is talking about is light-weight Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). For a good overview of SOA in a library context I can recommend the series of five of posts by Eric Schnell. The standards around SOA - XML, REST, etc., are the ones I believe in. These are the standards that are opening up the wider computing world, well understood by those we need to integrate with.
The word integration has many meanings to many people, and they are all relevant. There is integration with things in the library, from entry gate systems, self-service systems, and booking systems etc.; integration with library system components, OPAC services such as Aquabrowser, and WorldCat Local, management information systems, EDI services, cataloging services, etc.; integration with in-organization external systems such as student registry, institutional finance, CRM and identity systems; integration with virtual learning & learning management systems, student portals, browser plug-ins, resolvers, repositories, etc.; integration with union catalogues, national and international discovery solutions, Google Scholar, LibraryThing, journal aggregators etc. - I could go on and on .....
What we have learnt from the Talis Keystone SOA integration product, is that if you measure your ease of use, barrier to entry and understanding, from the point of view of those outside the library sector you will deliver something that motivates, not hinders, integration projects. An integration tool using open APIs, supported by an open sand-box 'play with it' test area and an open community sharing what they have done with it really drives innovation.
So how do we realize the benefits demonstrated by Keystone for the wider world? - Opening up the Keystone integration infrastructure for more than just Talis systems is one way, sharing and building on initiatives such as John Blyberg's PatREST and the DLF's ILS Abstraction API, is another.
So today Andrew, with the occasional exception such as Talis Keystone, interoperability with systems in the library world is a fanciful notion. With application of experience from the wider SOA world tomorrow will not be that far away.
Image from Flickr by Victory of the People
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