'next gen' lib systems (in progress)

At Friday morning’s session, Kyle Banerjee gave an hour-long presentation on “next generation” library search systems. Early in his comments, he pointed out was the immaturity of the existing options, noting that none of the vendor solutions such as Encore, Primo, and WorldCat Local were in production use as of January 1 of this year.

What’s the purpose of next generation systems? What are we trying to accomplish? In the big picture, we need to build an e-space that library users can navigate to and use as if it is a single space. Two desired attributes listed by Kyle are enabling the seamless integration of products maintained by many vendors and data providers and, often overlooked, retaining critical functionality that exists in our current systems.

I plan to work to significantly increase the WSU Libraries’ support for the Orbis Cascade Alliance’s Summit search system development efforts. Already, in a very early prototype, we’ve been able to successfully test a Summit search interface with a WSU Libs facet (so that only materials held by one or more WSU libraries are retrieved). I had a short discussion with Kyle this morning and he noted the importance of having multiple programmers involved in the effort from a sustainability perspective. In describing the effort to deans and directors at Alliance libraries, it’s a much harder sell if there are 1-2 technologists supporting the core development work. It’s a bit of a philosophical shift for the WSU Libs, but I believe that it’s essential in moving forward in the systems area.