Library Resource Management Systems: New Challenges, New Opportunities October 8-9, 2009 Marshall Breeding Director for Innovative Technology and Research Vanderbilt University Library Library Technology Guides

Trajectory  Changing roles of libraries and the nature of their collections demand corresponding changes in supporting technologies  Enormous challenges to deliver appropriate:  Discovery platforms  Business automation systems  Yet…turnover of library automation products very slow

Library Context  Academic libraries: increased emphasis on enterprise interoperability  All Libraries: Transition to larger proportions of non-print content  Emphasis on full-text delivery: e-journals, e- books, digitized books  Shrinking library budgets: Cuts made in these economic times may never be recovered  Public Libraries: operational efficiency  All libraries: higher levels of resource sharing

Technology context  New Technology Cycle  Cloud computing:  Platform-as-a-service (Amazon EC2)  Storage services (C3)  Software-as-a-service  Delivery to mobile devices  Enterprise level infrastructure  Legacy:  Local/departmental computing  Client/server  Local servers

Business and procurement cycles

General Business Trends  Very complex market  Local national and regional companies & Global competitors  Increasingly consolidated and global  Concentration of library automation into a smaller niche of companies

Predominance of Proprietary ILS products  The vast majority of libraries choose to license proprietary ILS products from established vendors  Some of these companies continue to see growth in new client libraries  Defections to competitors and open source currently happen at relatively low levels  Many unannounced open source projects may alter this trend

Dynamics of library automation changing  Commercial companies developing and supporting proprietary products prevail  Open source ILS procurements  Non-profit OCLC cooperative positioned to play a larger role

Technology and product strategies  Evolved products?  Can the existing slate of major ILS products morph over time to meet the ever widening gaps between design and functionality and changing library requirements  Fresh starts possible?

Evolutionary path  Unicorn -> Symphony  INOVAQ > Innopac -> Millennium/Encore  Urica -> Spydus  VUBIS -> Vubis Smart -> V Smart  ALEPH 100… ALEPH 500/Verde/SFX -> URM

Forging a fresh path  OLE – Ready to launch 2-year build phase  Open Source  URM -- (New or evolved?)  Commercially licensed open platform  Web-scale library automation  OCLC WorldCat Local cooperative library management system

Research and development activities  Do the systems libraries really need exist yet?  Research and Development essential to develop systems to meet the needs of libraries and issues identified in this Forum  Where will this take place?  Companies?  Libraries?   Vendor / Library collaboration

The Business of Open Source ILS  Library procurement of open source ILS  Commercial support companies  Small and fragmented  Many open source implementations taking place independent of commercial support contracts

Open Source ILS Companies  Exists at the lower bounds of sustainability, with some showing significant growth.  Fragmented approach can diffuse already limited resources

Open source alternatives gaining increasing support  Many libraries energized to take on local development projects  Traditional vendors interested in making best use of open source components  The direct adoption of open source products represents only one aspect of open source in the library automation industry.

Support by Grant-making bodies  Andrew W. Mellon Foundation  Georgia Public Library Systems recognized with Award for Technology Collaboration ($50,000)  OLE (Open Library Environment)  $475,700 Phase I  ?? Phase II  eXtensible Catalog  $283,000 Phase I  $749,000 Phase II  IMLS  “Empowered by Open Source”  $998,556  Led by King County + Peninsula Library System in California, the Ann Arbor District Library in Michigan and the Orange County Library System in Florida

A conversation about software licensing  Move beyond Open Source / Proprietary software as philosophical arguments.  SaaS largely neutralizes the pragmatic differences  Software choices made on the merits of functionality  Company choices made on the merits of their service delivery

Discovery / Library Business Automation  Now viewed as separate problem  Many interdependencies  Current model of feeding discovery systems from many underlying repositories  ILS / e-journal collections / collections of digital objects  Will models of resource management change to consolidate the repositories?  Realign Discovery and management?

Discovery interface arena  Technology platforms becoming more mature  Major projects and products to bring full text article-level content within the primary purview of the discovery interface.  Next challenge: Full text indexes of books

New options and opportunities springing up  Many opportunities for libraries to contribute  Partnerships with vendors  Development partner / Beta test site  Participation in open source initiatives  Contribute to new and existing projects  VuFind, Blacklight, OLE, Evergreen Koha

Service oriented architecture  Preferred technology for new development projects  Web Services  Can function as the glue that ties legacy systems together  Building blocks of composed applications in an SOA environment  Legacy software will be around for a very long time.

Issues for Standards  Library infrastructure may be positioned for many major shifts  Will new models of automation be served by existing standards and best practices?  What will be the points of interoperability that will require technical agreements, best practices, standards as library automation models morph?  Help NISO and other relevant organizations broker technical agreements in time to drive, not hold back, new initiatives.  Increased library involvement will be extremely helpful

Many paths forward…