ETIG

This is not so much new or emerging but it’s an interesting study nonetheless: What Is Needed to Educate Future Digital Librarians: A Study of Current Practice and Staffing Patterns in Academic and Research Libraries.

“… surveyed current digital library professionals in academic libraries in the United States to identify their activities and skills and to detect any gaps in their training. We analyzed input from the survey responses to learn more about the nature of digital library work practices and to identify common and necessary attributes (knowledge and skills) required of “digital librarians.” The findings from our study have implications for the design of digital library education that meets real workplace needs.”

So take stock: have you got what it takes?

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.