I found a recent D-Lib article, lead authored by Brian Lavoie of OCLC, to be on target in terms of automation integration in libraries. The first two sentences of "A Service Framework for Libraries" provide a statement of the problem:
Much progress has been made in aligning library services with changing (and increasingly digital and networked) research and learning environments. At times, however, this progress has been uneven, fragmented, and reactive.
The core services described by Lavoie and his co-authors, Geneva Henry of Rice and Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC, are efforts that have been or are in the process of implementation by the WSU Libraries: an institutional repository system; metasearch; improving access to library digital collections; and, electronic resource integration. But are these efforts truly integrated? Is there a "shared picture of the library" guiding these efforts? I believe the technical difficulty of each of these tasks probably leads to the creation of project silos, which creates the opposite effect.
Yesterday, as one example, I was engaged in some work to better expose the Northwest Digital Archives content to a search engine. A colleague of mine coded an OAI-PMH data provider for the NWDA, and we worked together to submit information to Google. My point is, it’s sometimes difficult to focus on the big picture during this kind of development.
Lavoie and his colleagues propose the creation of a service framework which would have several benefits, including improving the ability for users outside of the library domain to access library services (because the services will increasingly be "surfaced in" non-library systems) and to better enable library use assessment. They depict the service framework effort as analogous to the digital preservation framework provided by OAIS.
The most important goal of the framework stated by the authors is "align[ing] business planning with systems development." Additionally, the authors directly address the technology silo issue:
Libraries have invested considerable effort into thinking about how their services should be organized and presented in changing environments. However, very little has been documented in ways that promote convergence of thinking, and perhaps even standardization. Libraries therefore lack consistent ways of presenting their services and communicating their value in new environments.
The article provides information on the proposed framework's vocabulary and structure. The concepts of decomposing library activities and of abstract services are both central in explaining the model. The article's conclusion provides one concrete example of the envisioned framework: it "represent[s] the library as a collection of autonomous yet linkable services, deployed and discoverable on the network through Web service technologies."
