ETIG

OK, this is cool.  As blogged on Catalogablog yesterday.  Go to this sample record at the American University of Rome Library and double-click any word you see on the display there, e.g. Arlington.  Up pops a little info on the person, word or whatever.  Powered by Answer Tips.

This chart created by Marshall Breeding is kinda neat. It’s a visual history of the development of the ILS from 1970-today.

The Digital Library Federation conducted a survey of academic libraries in the fall of 2007 to find out what sort of interest there was in exploring the “integration of ILS data with non-ILS discovery systems.” Of the 100 respondents 40% are looking to change their ILS and 35% of this group are considering open source solutions. That’s a fairly sizable number.

The chair of the DLF group, John Mark Ockerbloom, referenced the report recently in a post on Everybody’s Library called ‘Blowing the lid off the ILS (and the providers’ chance to have a say)‘. He writes,

“What’s become increasingly clear to those of us trying to move information discovery forward is that we can no longer expect a single ‘integrated library system’ to satisfy our current and emerging collection discovery needs by itself.“

The post is really a follow up to an invitation for interested parties (developers, vendors, and other service providers) to participate in another DLF initiative to draft a ’set of functional requirements’ that could be used to develop ’standard machine interfaces that allow us to build and provide new discovery systems on top of whatever ILS we have …’

Dan Scott spoke at OLA yesterday morning about the progress of the Evergreen implementation that Laurentian, Windsor and McMaster are working on.

It’s all sounding good and evidence that movement away from the perceived restrictions of current proprietary integrated library systems is steadily gathering momentum.