On 6/21/06, Bernhard Eversberg <ev_at_biblio.tu-bs.de> wrote:
> That sounds like you advocate a complete decoupling of OPAC
> and ILS,
Yes, absolutely; I don't understand the fascination for mammoth
systems, and I think a lot of people in the library world is waking up
to find that their monolith systems should be a series of decoupled
services. You may know where this leads to :) but I'm a huge SOA guy.
> with regular automatic updates of the former from the latter?
Depends on what is the best process, but it seems an export from the
ILS on a nightly basis is ok if you've got a big ILS that handles it
all.
> It would mean that the OPAC could be the same even when the
> ILSs are radically different.
Yes, it's a comfortable consistancy problem solved. In fact, you can
totally swap out your ILS without affecting the OPAC in any way at
all, neither in features nor look and feel.
> Besides the OPAC then being not 100% up-to-date, what
> disadvantages might make you reluctant to call it "next
> generation"?
I hate fads? :) Seriously, that the OPAC is 12 hours behind your ILS
means probably very little. The main disadvantage I guess is that
there is no vendor support for the OPAC. The good thing about this is
of course that there is no vendor tie-in either. And given the
user-interface to most OPACS today, I'd say it's a good thing to get
away from them.
Another big advantage is that you can concentrate on the
user-interface of what you've got instead of asking vendors for
features. It isn't that hard to extend something you've got all the
sources and data for; Lucene is open-source, got a huge following and
community, bundles of plugins and extra applications (like Nutch) ...
it supports stemming, clustering, just heaps, and heaps of stuff, and
growing every day. All you have to worry about is creating the
user-interface you think suits your users, which we all do through UCD
of course. :)
Anyways, we're dumping the prototype to a test machine, and it's being
opened tomorrow, and that's very exciting because we want to share our
stuff with the lib community. The system is also exposed as a
webservice in a Topic Maps lookalike schema which I also reuse for
other applications; adding complex search to other applications is a
matter of parsing some XML. It's a *very* powerful notion, because we
don't have to wait for a single vendor to a) understand our problem,
nor b) try to come up with a solution for it.
Alex
--
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
- Frank Herbert
__ http://shelter.nu/ __________________________________________________
Received on Wed Jun 21 2006 - 06:37:12 EDT