Replace, all or part?

Thanks for the question, Mark, on what gives--are we looking at replacing our whole ILS, or do we maintain our OPAC interface AND put up additional resource discovery interfaces such as WorldCat Local, VuFind, Primo, or Blacklight.

In reading over the posts to this blog, I am noticing two things that folks have mentioned. One is that their libraries are either in the process of replacing their ILS or looking to decouple their public library catalog interface and offer something completely new.

From my limited pointed of view, replacing the whole ILS is a long, slow, tedious process involving a lot of decision makers. Yet so much innovation is going on in user interfaces now. I'd hate to be stuck with my clunky Voyager interface for years longer while I wait for it to slowly upgrade, or wait for the whole RFP process to take place.

Some of my library patrons have told me "your library catalog is 10 years out of date." And "I can't find anything unless I know what I'm looking for." Frankly it isn't really true that the catalog is 10 years out of date. People forget how fast things have changed! But it sure seems like it when other interfaces around us like for Amazon and Google seem to be updating all the time and are so simple while our catalog is still using old search strategies. We've only last month implemented relevancy ranking in search results as the default, and this is only in one type of search--words anywhere. If you do a title search, it's still alpha order. And we still can't really do any sort of faceting of search results.

So for all of these reasons, I'm looking to make our public library catalog software something that runs far faster and is far easier to revise and update than what we have currently. And I don't want to wait. Long ago we used locally created interface software called NLS--it was decoupled from our ILS. Frankly with live linking out to grab the circulation status, I'm thinking decoupling our OPAC interface a better choice for library patrons now, given that there are far better indexing and web searching tools available than there were when we moved off the old NLS platform. By decoupling our catalog interface from our ILS, we'll be able to more quickly innovate and more quickly integrate journal article searching and other types of data with our catalog data. (Yes we have MetaLib and we can do metasearching, but in real-time it isn't quick. I'm really thinking pre-harvesting and indexing of various data feeds is a better solution for patrons in most cases.) Because if it's one thing I hear and see all the time, it's that people won't wait. If it's not fun to search and the results are overwhelming, they soon leave.

And besides, I think my co-worker Steve Meyer, and other library bloggers whose names I am not currently remembering have a good point that it's time to make software much faster than we've been able to in the past. It's time to actually control the interface our public sees. And maybe we'll learn something about indexing in the process.

Introduction

Mike Simpson, of UW-Madison DoIT ... boring details, personal philosophy, geeky technical rambling.

Hmmm, something specific to the camp: possibly original, merely the messenger.

Things won't stand still

One of the things I would like to discuss is the fact that the library software market-place will not stand still. Products are being developed so quickly that it makes it difficult to close the door. We thought we had evaluated all of the PAC Discovery tools out there, and now there are 3 more that we really should look at. It's not that we don't want to, but where do you draw the line?

When you apply this to Open Source ILS options, the problem is compounded.

Are others struggling with this issue?

Stephen Elfstrand and MnPALS: Introduction and Summary

Hi All,

I'm Stephen Elfstrand, Executive Director of PALS; the office supporting the MnPALS Consortium of Libraries in Minnesota. I've been here nearly a year now. Many of you know me from my previous position as Head of Systems and Circulation and the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. I'm looking forward to seeing you all again at WILSWorld.


MnPALS consists of the MnSCU public higher education institutions including State Universities, Community Colleges and Technical Colleges. Basically everything except the University of Minnesota. In addition, we have several state government libraries such as the DNR and Legislative Reference Library and we have several private institutions such as St. John's / St Ben's and Gustavus Adolphus. There are 63 libraries in all. We are currently using Aleph from Ex Libris,as our library management system and have we think the largest multi-ADM environment of any Aleph site. Since Ex Libris is working on a successor product to both Aleph and Voyager, we know there is a system migration in our future.

We are investigating several approaches for Next Gen Library Systems. An example is Open Source ILSs. We recently paid Equinox and LibLime to come to our office and do two-day seminars and go into greater detail than what is available in the 1-2 hour "gee-whizz" demos we've all seen at conferences. Day one was a technical seminar that discussed HW, system architecture, development environment languages. etc. We have actually installed both on servers here. Day two was a functional review of each system and a review of the development plans. Our conclusion is that neither are really ready for a major shared system for an academic library consortium that needs a full feature set that includes Serials, Acq, ILL, Course Reserves, booking, etc. but that they are both moving in the right direction and we are tracking their developments closely.

As for discovery layers we looked seriously an Open Source product that uses SOLR and Lucene: Fac-Bac-OPAC and got fairly far along with it. Later though we looked into VUFind and thought that it had a more advanced feature set, especially for Web 2.0 features, tagging etc. So we decided to go to that as a platform. We hope to release our VUFind for use by any library that wants to use it by August 15th.

We are also brokering OCLC WorldCat Local for several libraries, so I guess we are taking a "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach to the future,rather that trying to figure out what "The Best Way" is. It is significant in this regard that we have a wide variety of libraries and so there may not be one solution that works for all. We hope at a "reference work day" next spring we can have some of our members compare and contrast VUFind and WCLocal in terms of retrieval, display and user acceptance.

We are brokering OCLC Link Manager for some of our members but we are also looking into the CUFTS open source OpenURL linking product for future use. CUFTS is also working on open source ERM and federated search tools, which we find interesting. Since state budgets for higher ed are not growing, rather the opposite and of course library services budgets are tight as well, it is unlikely that we can afford to buy Metalib or Primo - types of products. Our conclusion is that we will have to grow our own to some extent if we want to offer any beyond-the-OPAC/LMS services to our members in the future.

Introduction

My name is Amy Gannaway and I'm the Cataloging and PAC Support Specialist for the South Central Library System, and I provide support to our member libraries for the cataloging and PAC modules for our ILS. As Heidi already mentioned, we are currently evaluating a new ILS and OPAC, so I have been following next generation OPAC and ILS developments for the past year or so. I am looking forward to getting a new OPAC for our catalog because our current OPAC is showing its age.

Introduction and Final Report on Resource Discovery, U. Wisconsin Madison

Hello, I'm Sue Dentinger, Network Services Librarian for the Library Technology Group and University of Wisconsin Digital Collections. With Kelli Keclik, I recently co-chaired a "Resource Discovery Exploratory Task Force". We were charged with developing a vision for information resource discovery in the Libraries that supports teaching, learning and research at UW-Madison. Our goal was to better understand our patron’s and their information seeking behaviors and come up with ideas on how we can better satisfy their information and resource discovery needs.

As part of this, we undertook an online survey of our library patrons, held focus groups and listening sessions (where we got an earful!), looked at several resource discovery projects or products which might be an improvement over what we have now, used CrazyEgg software to get a start on better understanding how our patrons currently use some of our web pages, and finally we produced a report detailing our recommendations. The report and recommendations are available via: http://uwlibdiscovery.blogspot.com/2008/06/executive-summary-of-our-final-report.html

The committee has just ended, and now library management will be deciding how to deal with these recommendations. But I really appreciated the opportunity listen to our clientele and think and read a bit more about the many problems our patrons have using our licensed resources to find what they need and exploring better solutions. So I'm looking forward to this chance to interact with all of you on this topic.