Professional Development

Erik, Chris, Lauren C. (sorry Lauren) , Mary Beth, Carol, Susan, and Tim atended an OLE sponsored webinar about CUFTS. CUFTS is a series of open source applicaitons including an OpenURL resolver, a database management application, an ERMS, and an open source knowledge base.

Part of the conversation centered around developing community support for the knowledge base and Carol had the intersting suggestion that community contributions to the knowledge base could build ‘credits’ to encourage contribution.

The webinar is archived at the OLE website.

In the afternoon we broke up into 8 groups and brainstormed blue sky elements. Some of the key ideas that came out of the discussion were:

• Decide what OLE is about - being an inventory system or adiscovery on teh web system
• Powerful, automatable staff clients
• Web localization - be a point of need service center, federated discovery
• Distributed data model, self-documenting version control
• Universal workflow ticketing module, dynamically configurable
• Complex reporting, data manipulation, audit trail, rollback
• License tracking and interpretation needs
• ERMS in the ILS - format agnosticism with sophisticated functionality
• Built-in OpenURL resolver
• Need to better track relationships between entities (multiple hierarchies, complex business relationships)
• The ILS as linked data
• Should a new ILS have descriptive data in it?
• Mesh with interoperable industry data standards
• What impact do international users have on system design (Unicode)
• Universal proxy control -
• A re-examination of the core functionality that should be included in the next gen system and what should not be included.
• A service management system that extends beyond the immediate functional needs of the ils

One portion of the workshop today included a categorization of course library processes and related sub-processes. The following processes were gathered from some small group work & grouped and categorized during the morning session. The key areas were:

Acquire/license
select, identify for acquisition, import data, manage funds, order, track, interoperate with external systems, interact with external purchasing systems, audit, license, account/weed/deacquire

Metadata services
Create, obtain, enhance, ingest, maintain, normalize, license, share, manage relationships (with internal/external systems)

Inventory
Weeding, Prepare item for shelf, identify/manage location, confirm availability, audit trail for services, access/rights management, consortial issues

Borrowing

Policy applicaiton, user authentication, resource identification, fulfilment services, notification services, ILL, Delivery, Proxy (patron, access)

Discovery

Browse, search, display, help, resource integration (multi-format), resource enhancement (external metadata), gather user input/feedback, user-type specific features, manipulate data, export data, import data

Reporting

Export data, provide views, data warehousing, automation/scheduling, customization, export/migration

Preservation

Version tracking, archiving, (ran out of time)

Overarching trends

Increase in electronic, importance of user authentication service, importance of enabling relationships between systems, variety of disovery services, ability to recombine/remix, better access to data, more connections/collaboration between data/users/institutions/libraries, need to push data to external systems, ability to represent/apply license terms, increase in serialization of resources, increase in interoperability/collaboration needs, debate between federation (local indexing - just in case), and meta-search ( distributed indexing - just in time).

Day 1: OLE Project, Duke University

On Monday, December 15, Lauren C., Erik and Mary Beth attended the OLE Project , Open Library Environment Regional Design Workshop held at Duke University

The OLE Project is funded by a grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and is meant to design an architecture for an open source ILS.Day 1 participants began to describe critical processes.We had pre conference homework which included thinking about:1. Which feature, currently available in the ILS would we not want to live without?2.What is the biggest frustration with the ILS?3.How would you describe what an ILS is?4.If you could design an ILS today, what would it look like and how would it function?There were 50 to 60 participants from all around the south east, most from academic libraries, and one from Forsyth County Public. (Interestingly, only a handful of people from Access Departments, many more from Systems, Acquisitions and Cataloging. No one was here representing Special Collections or Preservation.)

The group work today through breakout sessions and then in the larger group, was to identify the work that was core and broad enough to be flexibly build into the ILS.There was some healthy debate about what needed to be included in the “critical” category, as well as what was to be included as “high level” enough.We had a chance to try out a 4/6 presentation wherein one participant brought forth a burning issue and discussed it for 4 minutes, then the group was given 6 minutes to comment or question the presenter.The issue the participant brought forth was the importance of creating an ILS that will support consortia, and I thought how valuable that would be as we move forward with more TALA like agreements.The last lecture of the day was describing service oriented architecture and business process modeling.Then we had a chance to practice creating a model process that included creating a process map for checking out a book and all the decision points that go into that simple process.(It was more challenging than it sounds.)

Today we are going to be doing more business process modeling.

This afternoon, a group of Carptenter, PCL, and ZSR library staff gathered together to watch the first OLE Project webcast. The webcast discussed their scope, goals, and accomplishments to date. The project is still in its early stages but intends to design a new ILS based on SOA principles. Interestingly, they are already looking towards the “build” phase which will possibly start in July 2009.

During the Q&A session, there was an interesting statement that there was hope that the build phase would take about 2 years. There were some related comments about being able to use the development efforts of other projects as well.

There are some detailed notes in the library wiki.