On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 5:22 PM, Eric Lease Morgan <emorgan_at_nd.edu> wrote:
> On Apr 17, 2008, at 2:05 PM, Tim McGeary wrote:
>
>
> > Let me say straight up that I don't think the ILS-DI group is wasting
> > their time or anything of that nature. It's a great effort, and more
> > efforts like this should be organized.
> >
>
> There is almost always two sides to every story. I would like to hear
> what some of the library vendors think of all this.
Donning my Vendor(tm)(R)(C)(SM) hat for a moment...
I greatly appreciate this effort. It provides a guide to what working
librarians perceive to be critical services that should be provided by
their ILS within a specific context, and it spells out, in
straightforward, unambiguous terms (*cough*NCIP*cough*), the semantics
encoded in a Discovery Interface interoperability API. Of course, it
doesn't hurt that I happen to be designing and developing a new
consortial borrowing platform (<shameless-plug>
http://esilibrary.com/blog/?cat=8 </shameless-plug>) and one of the
core components just happens to need an API shape very similarly to
the ILS-DI proposal.
Now, mind you, I'm speaking as an Open Source vendor. By our very
nature we strive for interoperability and openness in the software we
create and the services we provide. I leave it as an exercise for the
reader to research and decide whether proprietary vendors have a
history of doing the same, and whether they will, and indeed will
_have_ to, in the future.
--
Mike Rylander
| VP, Research and Design
| Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
| phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
| email: miker_at_esilibrary.com
| web: http://www.esilibrary.com
Received on Thu Apr 17 2008 - 19:04:31 EDT