ILS - Perfect Storm
Its fascinating how words and phrases gain popular meaning beyond the their initial introduction - I see that w00t and Facebook became the 1st & 2nd Merriam-Webster’s Words of the Year 2007. In similar vein the 2000 film The Perfect Storm has since led to it’s use in signifying a conjunction of two or more effects/events that individually will cause problems, but together become overwhelming.
Watching the blogosphere go by, and listening to podcasts, recently, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that the ILS (LMS here in the UK) that we all know and love put up with is rapidly approaching a Perfect Storm.
So what are the elements of this storm, that could probably just wash over us if they arrived individually.
Cataloguing Practices
This from Scribe in a post about the Functions of Cataloging:
I do think that the role of catalogers is changing, though, even though the mandate remains the same. As we inevitably move away from books and move past other forms of media into more raw data, our means of making it available are changing.
The old standards are starting to creak at the seams as they try to cope with the multiplicity of materials physical and digital form. Take a look at the video of CiteUlike’s Richard Cameron from the Talis Insight Conference. [Day 2 16:00 Track 2]. He does an excellent job of demonstrating the stupidity of cataloguing journal articles by publisher, or even worse by aggregator. We might as well have catalogue books by size.
Good ol’ Marc and some of the other standards like EAD, MODS, RDA, ONIIX, etc. are not really up to the job of of providing a metadata format that will bridge this multiplicity of media types and delivery formats. Today most ILSs work with one format, Marc. Enabling them to handle many others would be a massive undertaking.
ILS System Vendors
We are in the middle of a massive upheaval in the ILS market. To see the effects of the tribulations of just one of the merged and venture capitalist owned players in the market, see what the Scribe has to say about being at the wrong end of these tribulations - and why her library is looking around.
I was talking to my husband about the apparently anti-competitive behavior on the part of SirsiDynix in relation to Horizon, and he said “ah, but it’s really just good business practice.”
Almost without exception, every ILS vendor is sat on top of one, or in some cases several, aging ILSs that can not be reengineered fast enough to either satisfy the ambitions of their customers or the financial ambitions of their masters. That is without massive investment, that wouldn’t fit wit their master’s plans either.
Open Source
There has been much excitement about Koha and Evergreen. Coupled with much discussion about their influence on the ILS market - covered in depth in the recent Library 2.0 Gang podcast.
I predict these will have their major effect in opening up thinking in the ILS market. Evergreen has some way to go before reaching full functionality, and Koha has yet to prove its self in larger installations. Even if one or both overcome this, they are still just ILSs as we currently know them - too wedded to the way of designing and building an ILS, a way that evolved many years ago.
Libraries are no longer islands
Gone are the days when a Public Library can stand alone as just a source of books and knowledge in a community - they need to claim their place in the online presence of the communities they serve, interacting with the education, local & regional government, health, and voluntary organisations in their area.
The Academic Library has an even greater need to broaden its interaction with the wider University and the online world. The students they serve are now online animals to whom going to the library to get a book is becoming an anachronism. The majority of [accessed] information provided by libraries will soon not be held by them - stored by journal aggregators, or in archives, and just referenced by the library. The [current] integration between leaning management/e-learning systems, reading list systems, and the systems that library run is at best unsatisfactory, at worst nonexistent.
This is all without taking account of the back office integration between the library and finance, ordering, student registration and other systems in the other parts of organisations they operate within. In these times of organisational efficiency and value for money - library thiefdoms are becoming increasingly unjustifiable.
Social and Semantic Webs
We are seeing functionality, improved end user experience, interaction with other users in and across communities , information derived from the actions, of others etc. emerge from the many social and [at the moment few] Semantic Web developments on the Internet. These are but small clues as to what is possible by capturing user intention and linking data from many sources could make possible. These clues are critically relevant to the way libraries need to evolve rapidly over the next few years if they are not to be overwhelmed by influences outside their traditional domain.
2008 looks to be a year when the volume will be tuned up on most if not all of these disruptive elements. The Perfect Storm for the ILS?
January 7th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
“[Evergreen, Koha] are still just ILSs as we currently know them - too wedded to the way of designing and building an ILS, a way that evolved many years ago.”
Hi Richard,
Just a nitpick, but with Evergreen we specifically pulled in developers from outside the library world for designing the architecture, just so they wouldn’t have any preconceived notions on how to build an ILS.
It’s the work-flows from the libraries that haven’t really changed all that much (and maybe that’s what you really meant here). If libraries manage to evolve, Evergreen and its nice service oriented architecture will evolve right along with them. And since it such as a flexible platform upon which to experiment and innovate, perhaps Evergreen will be a catalyst for such change.
We can hope!
– Jason
January 7th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Nitpick away!
You are right about what I really meant - it is not only the work-flows but also the perceived ‘job’ of the ILS that has not changed over the years.
Evergreen’s nice service oriented architecture may well place it better than many to change and innovate.
–Richard
January 7th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Thanks for the cites, Richard. And as to what you said about ILS design, I actually think you’re right…while the front-end of catalogs may be changing (at least in look/feel), the back end of ILSes remains virtually the same. Now, is that the fault of the creators or the users, I don’t know, but I’m reminded of when I was working for a library that had just purchased a serials module from their ILS vendor. The serial librarians were totally confused (since they had been using typewriters since the 1930s), and asked “So, will the computer screen look like a catalog card?”
We have a long way to go.