Library Catalogues need to cater for light-weight discovery clients

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:11:26 +0000

Way back I wrote a piece about the changing model for library catalogues, you can see it here. The main premise was that trying to maintain records in a Library Management System (LMS/ILS) for all the items you want your users to discover is no longer feasible. This is especially true in this here digital age, trying to maintain records for all the e-journals a University has access to is an almost impossible task, and LMS were not designed for thousands of MARC records to be dropped and then re-imported (i.e. sync’d) with another source. And what about all the free stuff, is an e-book not worth being discovered by users because it is free?

JISC Library Management System Review

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:48:09 +0000

The JISC and SCONUL have just released a Review (Horizon Scan) of Library Management Systems (LMS or ILS). Intersting stuff. A lot of stuff to be expected, and some interesting findings:

Dire need to embrace web 2.0 and to get OPACs out of the 90s
The need to intergrate with campus systems such as Financial and registry systems.
Open Source is used within current systems, and as systems in their own right, the latter have no real penetration in the UK market and are unlikely to do so in the short term (lack of advantages), and are not currently more ‘open’ than other systems.
Most major systems are much of a muchness (they put it far more elegantly, though after glancing through 100 odd pages I’m not much inclined to find each quote), little reason to change system at the moment. Especially as…
It is a good time for the role and definition of a LMS to be looked at.
We are already moving away from the ‘one big system approach’ i.e. Aquabrowser, ERMs and Metasearch are all separate products. Almost certainly going to move in this direction, and this is a good thing. This requires standards and cooperation for different systems to talk to each other.
UK market is small compared to global market, though not that different to the norm, except for BL ILL server and our concept of Short Loans.
Libraries have not made good use of looking at how users work and interact with their systems.
There is a need and movement to liberate data (silios and all that)
LMS may become a back of house system (though this should not be seen as a bad thing)
Recommends that libraries increase the value of their investment by implementing additional services around the LMS. Which is fine if these new services are using standard protocols to interact with the LMS, if their are using proprietary api’s or talk direct to the database then it is another thing to lock the library in to one provider (or at least, another reason why changing LMS will have a large impact).
Procurement process is overall expensive, especially when LMSs are more or less the same-ish.
Encourages libraries to review their contracts (ie not changing system, just getting more – or better value – out of the current system with better contract).

One thing that interested me were the Vendor comments (and something the report reccommends to libraries) on the lack of consortia in the UK, and noted that other countries make good use of this (ie this is best practice). I can certainly see scope for this, especially as (like the report notes) the software has already been designed to handle consortiams.But what would the consortiams be? geographic based (London? South East? M25 group? Scotland) or perhaps using other groupings (Russel group, 94 group, CURL). Or perhaps smaller groupings based on counties or similar institutions.

Lms on nostuff.org archive | Chris Keene

Library Catalogues need to cater for light-weight discovery clients

JISC Library Management System Review