ICE is Nice
Posted On Aug 29 2007I am willing to admit that I remain skeptical about the “one big pile” approach to next generation catalogs that is sweeping the library automation world. While I don’t agree that advanced relevance ranking techniques are ineffective on bibliographic records (go look, there is no literature that I can find on this topic…there’s tons on full-text, but nothing on surrogate record relevance), I wonder what happens when the catalog becomes more than it used to be. If a relevance algorithm is based on whether or not a library holds a title, what happens when an article is thrown in the …
What Next? Part 3: Challenge
Posted On Jun 6 2007This is the third and final instalment of “What’s Next” for the library automation marketplace. Time to review: Major consolidation of the library automation market, the emergence of viable open source software solutions and new business models for supporting them, and a somewhat rancorous and impatient customer base that fears that profit and efficiency have out-gunned innovation and service. This is the making for a dangerous cocktail. What’s a vendor to do? What’s a library to do? The Prod IMHO, I suspect that most libraries are going to sit tight. As have been mentioned many times, the pain and expense …
What Next? Part 2: The Open Source ILS
Posted On May 30 2007It’s true that I am one of the skeptics. I’ll state that up front. But, in truth, my skepticism toward building an open source integrated library system was born in optimism that the vendors of proprietary software would be paying close attention to the landscape. Alas, I don’t think they were. Some tried Most people have forgotten that Dynix wrote a white paper in 2003 called“Horizon Open Technology: A Vision for the Future” that was the basis of the original Horizon 8.0 (I looked all over for this white paper online and had to fall back on my own archive). …