It can be informing, affirming and on occasion surprising when members of the OCLC community take to the public stage. In the case of the recent LITA Forum, these converged in a very positive way as four panelists presented their early experiences with Web-scale Management Services. After a brief product overview from my OCLC colleague, Rob Ross (thank you, Rob, for so adroitly stepping in to take part in this presentation) , the crowd heard from Jason Griffey (Univ of Tennessee, Chattanooga), Kyle Banerjee (Orbis Cascade Alliance), Michael Dula (Pepperdine Univ) and Gina Persichini (Idaho Commission for Libraries).
The slides and video of the event are available online here. Watch them in any order. They are all great! “It’s early days,” as some of my friends and colleagues in the UK would say, but they are exciting days. These pilots and early implementors are to be congratulated for taking a bold step into the future of cloud-based library management services. I can say without doubt that we could not have done it without them. These four are already in the company of several others who are in various stages of early adoption, and excitement and interest is growing quickly amongst many, many libraries across the country and around the globe.
