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.

I’ll quote two bullet points in their reccommendations:

• The focus on breaking down barriers to resources is endorsed, involving single sign on, unifying workflows and liberating metadata for re-use.
• SOA-based interoperability across institutional systems is emphasised as the foundation for future services and possibly the de-coupling of LMS components

The report also says “Libraries currently remain unconvinced about the return on their investment in electronic resource management systems.” Not really, we’re just waiting for a good one to come to market

I like a comment from one of the reference group “Since around 2000 there has been a growth in the perception of the library collection not as something physical that you hold, but as something you organise access to.” Nothing new, but nicely put.

Report can be found here [pdf], took ages to find where it is on the JISC website (JISC website? confusing? surely not!), but it is here (and the key item – the report – is at the very very bottom of the page (why?). I originally found the report via Talis’ Panlibus blog.

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Just come across Wordpress WMU. Allows you to manage multiple Wordpress blogs within one installation, and do handy things like allow users to use the same account (with different permissions) across different blogs.

This could well be handy as I’ve recently setup a number of blogs at work for various purposes, all Wordpress, and while quick to install and upgrade, and time to do this starts to add up. Worth checking out.

Aside 1: writing this blog post in flock.
Aside 2: Discovered Wordpress WMU while trying to guess at the url for a blog on the next version of Prism – the web catalogue for the library system from Talis – a blog which probably doesn’t even exist (they have one for their new readinglist system). While trying various guesses for the potential directory name for the (non)blog in question, I got a ‘hey create a new blog with this name’ instead of a 404. nice.

[was clearly being a bit of a retard when I wrote this and failed to copy two letters correctly, it is Wordpress MU - for multiuser - not WU. I only noticed this a few weeks later when googling for Wordpress WU and finding my post as the first hit]

Tags: wordpresswu, talis, flock, blogs

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You may have already seen that a while a go I had a little play with the Talis Platform, and specifically a ’store’ on the platform called ukbib which holds bibliographic records. I’ve written some pages on learning about the various parts to the platform. I had seen on the Talis Developer Network (TDN) various web services, but they all blurred in to one, the pages linked to above first work out the simple ones (e.g. linking to catalogues, holdings etc), this helped clear up the different bits that are available.

The pages then move on to playing with the ukbib ’store’ which returns XML, you can then use XSLT to turn this in to (x)html.

So, after playing with XML, XSLT, and improving my CSS along the way, I can show the very first ’work in progress’:

demostration of the library catalogue search.

[update: see here for an updated version]

All very early days, layout is quite basic and a number of things don’t work.

Things that don’t work (or sometimes don’t work):

• The options on the right are based on the first ISBN found. Some recordshave several ISBNs andthe first one may be a ‘odd’ one, therefore searching Amazon, Wikipedia, libraryThing based on the unusal ISBN will probably produce either no result or the wrong item.
• “See Books by” Author search on the bottom right hand side doesn’t work. The formating of the author’s name is probably not helping, and because this is being done in XSLT I can’t call [the php function] urlencode to turn the author names in to nice strings for the URL.
• Some of the Subject searches don’t work or return odd results. This will hopefully be simply to fix.
• holdings from libraries are not there yet.

Things you can do:

• in the google-style search box you can prefix any field name to the front of a search term, e.g. Title:”programming perl”

• title:programming title:perl author:wall

• subject:”DDC: 005.72″

• You can basically use any field name, I didn’t write this, it is part of the way the platform works, see here for more.

• link to the same item (if we have the right isbn, see above) on a number of other web sites, including wikipedia, Amazon, LibraryThing etc (let’s face it, this isn’t rocket science).

This is very much a work in progress, will hopefully have another update soon.

Now I need to find out why the above search uses ”author:wall” when the underlying xml uses ’creator’ not ’author’. hmmm.

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