Jonathan,
While I'm with you in spirit and can't disagree with any of your
points (and on alternate Tuesdays will make the very same argument), I
think there's a different spin to this responsibility question that is
at least worth exploring. To put a fine point on it, I'll use a
somewhat obnoxious syllogism, as a straw man. Vendors make money by
creating products that customers ask for (supply to meet the demand).
Libraries buy vendor ILSs. Therefore, libraries must have asked for
and wanted what vendors are selling.
One way to look at it is, naturally, that libraries are victims of bad
vendor products and need to wrest back control and responsibility over
our tools. I think we could just as easily state the flip side, that
vendors built exactly what we wanted and what we asked for, and we've
just woken up thirty years later to find that we didn't really mean
what we said. While their voices seem to be more muted than those of
librarians who declare that vendors don't listen or respond to what we
really need, I've heard my share of vendors complain that they would
love to innovate and exploit new technologies, but can't because
they're hide-bound by libraries asking for a parade of legacy tweaks
and features that consume all of their development resources.
I'm as profuse a cheerleader and proponent for open source,
collaborative, cooperative solutions as anyone I know, but I can't
help but pepper that with a dose of skepticism that the same
libraries that have killed the commercial ILS with the Death of a
Million Enhancement Requests by pursuing their own individual
self-interests will have much better success at "wresting back
control" to do it themselves.
It is apparent from the fact that every system and its third cousin is
rushing to implement faceted search (granted, the quality of the
facets vary...) that we found a way to voice a desire in a way that
was compelling enough vendors to act quickly on it. Now, that's only
one little piece of the next-generation catalog. Do we really want to
go through this for every piece? I think the workable solution is
going to come somewhere in between and may be built on an agreement
that goes something like this: We, the libraries, will stop paralyzing
you, the vendors, with a riot of discordant enhancement requests if
you, the vendors, will open your systems so that we, the libraries,
can hook into them and work with you to cooperatively build on them as
open platforms. Maybe then we will create a field in which "a thousand
discovery tools will bloom."
Again, not disagreeing, exactly, just floating a thought or two...
Best,
Maurice
--
************************************
Maurice York
Associate Head, Information Technology
NCSU Libraries
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695
maurice_york_at_ncsu.edu
Phone: 919-515-3518
On 4/25/07, Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind_at_jhu.edu> wrote:
> I worry. I worry that the way we got in the situation we are in now is
> by putting too much responsibility and control in the hands of our
> vendors. I previously saw the solution as wresting this control _and
> responsibility_ back from the vendors. We need to take responsibility
> for _figuring out_ how our tools should work, and we need to have the
> _ability_ to make what we figure out happen (or rather, to experiment in
> innovation toward that direction). On the one hand, to do this we
> certainly need coordination and collaboration between institutions,
> becuase none of us have the resources alone. On the other hand, we need
> to 'let a thousand discovery tools bloom' too, in an ecology of
> innovation and experimentation, to see what works.
>
> Giving the public catalog to OCLC is not that. With OCLC Local we have
> no more power to control what our interface looks like than we ever did.
> We are taking no more responsibility for figuring it out than we ever
> did. Choosing OCLC as a catalog 'vendor' feels like just more of the
> same---we are still just picking a vendor and letting them do all the
> work with no responsibility or control from us. In this case, the vendor
> just has a much better tool. For now. But it's still a kind of vendor
> lock-in.
>
> Note that OCLC Local already indexes article content----from OCLC
> provided databases only. I'm not suggesting that this is OCLC's choice,
> OCLC would (probably) like to index everyone elses articles too, but
> everyone else may or may not be okay with that. The point is, this is
> still a vendor we're dealing with. Or at any rate, an entity that has
> economic interests an awful lot like a vendor, relationships with other
> entities in the market (customers and competitors) an awful lot like a
> vendor, and as a result acts an awful lot like a vendor.
>
> Jonathan
>
>
>
> William Denton wrote:
> > Does anyone else suspect that the next generation catalogue has just
> > arrived, and it's called WorldCat Local?
> >
> > Bill
> > --
> > William Denton, Toronto : www.miskatonic.org www.frbr.org
> > www.openfrbr.org
> >
>
> --
> Jonathan Rochkind
> Sr. Programmer/Analyst
> The Sheridan Libraries
> Johns Hopkins University
> 410.516.8886
> rochkind (at) jhu.edu
>
Received on Wed Apr 25 2007 - 14:54:48 EDT