Friday, March 14, 2008
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Ex Libris Integrates Direct Links to Google "About this book" Pages in its Products
Friday, March 7, 2008
ILL, Document Supply and E-journals
Recent developments in Remote Document Supply (RDS) in the UK – 3
A recent article from Stephen Prowse of Kings College London available via eprints, above) looks at the future of document in terms of declining usage and the future of current suppliers. This is stacked against some interesting results from the Evidence Base Project for ejournal usage, and the growth of opan access repositories. This is all very relevant to our future planning of services and allocation of resources.
Enterprise email and blog processes
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Talis Insight 07 Conference - Marshall Breeding - Working toward a new model of library automation
systems/vendors and the emerging open source market.
the mid-90s. Recent mergers have reduced choice, and even newer systems such as Evergreen are doing the same things as existing systems.
increase pressure to innovate
increase pressure to decrease costs
make systems more open
We need to work towards a new ILS vision, e.g. current systems are based on workflows cast > 25 years ago, e-resources now represent >50% of our resources, many systems have large gaps e.g. ILL, collection development,
binding, remote storage.
The first stage of this has begun with the separation of the front-end (PAC) by using next-genration discovery tools/interface. Technology cycle is much faster at the front-end and this is only a small part of the library ILS
We should see a move towards service-oriented business architecture where web services allow the flexibility to weave a fabric of changing applications. This could lead to greater enterprise operability and open the door to massively consolidated implementations, of scaled up consortia.
The 'Global Enterprise' of Google, OCLC, Worldcat etc has to be tackled - what is our relationship with these? How can we leverage our content in enterprise discovery systems to drive users toward library resources e.g. by exposing the metadata.
We have to consider the place of MARC not only in an XML- based world, but also in a post-metadata world where users are searching the digital objects themselves.
'Web destinations' such as Amazon are now competing with libraries, increasing the pressure on us.
We have to break out of the marketing/consumer model when dealing with vendors and move towards dialogue and increased partnership.
Evolution or Revolution? Web 2.0 has invigorated libraries and it may be has provided the catalyst for the latter.