AquaBrowser Advisory Council meeting included an report from Harvard about their new installation, and a report on Oklahoma State’s combining AquaBrowser and Summon.
LITA Program Planning Committee I left with the charge to manage revision of the LITA manual pages for program planning for the annual conference.
LITA Top Technology Trends.
On mobile technology someone envisioned patrons being able to download to their mobile device from a workstation in the library. Clifford Lynch made the point that while mobile devices are ubiquitous actual computation is moving off devices and on to the “cloud”. but Preservation role of Research Libraries is not transferable to commercial vendors. So what info will we put in the ‘cloud’? We have yet to see a big scale failure there but it will happen and it will change how the ‘cloud’ is used. On mobile devices it is easier to capture video and images than text. This could impact communication.
Eric Lease Morgan commented if it’s in the “cloud” you are not preserving it. He predicted “open everything” in 5 years library software will be turned on its head, libraries will own and develop more of theri software. Libs will band together to get Elsevier to lower their prices. He did add that “open” needs to be tempered with reality and a mixture of open source and proprietary systems will be in use. He complained that libs don’t have the hutspah to force vendors to lower prices.
Joan Williams thought the vendors would target endusers and skip libraries. She thought Ebsco’s ads on NPR were an indication of that.
John Blyberg said enduser tools are where the money is right now but we are using frontends built on backends that have not been updated. In 10 years licensing software to run the backend will be replaced by Software as a Service offerings. This is separate from Open Source but they go together nicely.
Geert thought libraries would move from very rigid, completely closed systems to basic, simple software you can add on to and build from.
Cliff refused to speculate about future of library systems. More significatnt is future of authoring and communication in the academy which is becoming more open, collaborative, research data more widely available, scholarly commons will grow.Researc libraries will need very different kinds of systems than the past but there is an enormous historical mass of literature that embodies the past and it will be very problematic to deal with the link between scholarly lit of the past and future scholarly production.
Other issues brought up as of importance, digital humanities, “tools for narrative”, and then how to port across tools, and keepers of the narratives. An incredible amount of original documentary material available on the web but only a few scholars competent to deal with some, via paleography skills, etc. Bandwidth could be a problem. Amazon fedex’s drives for some installs for “cloud computing”. Economic pressures will cause sudden radical changes. Corporate records and histories could just disappear. Difficulties for the future of journalism might be an opportunity for libraries to help newspapers going online. Used to say “customer service” changed to “user experience.”
LLAMA SAAS Open Source meeting
Joe Lucia of Villanova University spoke on Open Source. He sees it as congruent with the social mission of libraries. Referenced Lawrencd Lessig, Yochai Benkler “Wealth of networks” Stephen Weber “The success of Open Source”. Libraries support eh cultural “commons”. Move ideology to the heart of the systems used. We must see libraries as “social”. Open source ia paradigm of a library. He sees the challenges against adoption of open source in libraries:
timid leadership
self destructive addiction to legacy data standards and practices
complex application in very small application space Acq systems especially
lack of practical alternatives to sunk costs of existing systems
allegiance to current work processes
unrealistic expectations that all will work perfectly immediately
Fixed resources, funding, budget
Culture of vendor dependence
lack of technical confidence
lack of broad and deep technical talent pool
dependence on individuals not growing a group
reluctance to hire and compensate technical staff
His ideal end state would be 3 years out 30% of all libs use Open Source and if you aren’t using it you feel you are falling behind.He suggested a need for community owned data infrastructure based on RDA to be used on teh Semantic web with networked data. This would need a rich commercial and nonprofit ecosystem for Open Source. He thought the Kuali type structure Ole was looking at was needed. I talked to him later and he’d like to move his ILS to open source. He mentioned the need to capitalize migration cost. If a model could be developed that did not front load the costs but allowed a library to migrate, end up with reduced support cost and payback on the migration with savings from ongoing costs. Hosted systems need to be an option and folks need to let go of legacy infrastructure and redirect money saved from support costs.
Other speakers talked about the Evergreen implementations of Michigan Library Consortium. They are starting with small libraries where III could not meet their price point. It still is not cheap enough for all small libs. Larger libs may be interested when Acq is available. How to share costs for it is an issue. Grand Rapids Pub Lib data center hosts their servers as they want to promote open source. Software development issue is how to contract to share costs, or wait for someone else to add a feature.
There was a report from the Waldo Consortium moving to Koha with support from LibLime. There are 15 libs. They have invested $600K in development. They had 21 dev projects after Liblime did a “scoping” report for them last year. That has become 50+ projects but some are when they split one project into 2, others are additional. Not all will be done. 7 libs are up, 7 will go up end of July, 1 Jan 2010l
Meadville PA reported on their experience as an early small library Koha user. they paid $35K to have Indexdata’s Zoom incorporated in the front end of Koha. After that he believes the php and Perl skills needed to add to the system are skills taught in any community college.
There was a question about problems with VuFind development and Joe explained the main developer, Andrew Nagy, had left and gone to Serials Solutions and that had caused problems. But they have hired in talent now.
I also attended the Evergreen get together and talked to Bob Molyneau. He said King County public library had been working with them and now would allow them to publicize the fact. They want to fund necessary development to go live in 2011, I believe.
