Re: so let's change the library environment: OLE Project Public Webcast

Along with what John Little responded, we plan to be active at regional 
and national conferences to report on our efforts as project members, to 
request input and feedback, and in the next few months opportunities to 
discuss business-workflow modeling.

For example a colleague at Lehigh and I will be presenting at PALINET in 
Philadelphia in October.  I hope to report at code4lib in February 2009 
in Providence, RI, and other project members are planning presentations 
and proposals.  You can watch this page as more presentations are 
planned: http://oleproject.org/category/presentations/

I think it is also important to point out that this project is focused 
on the back-end nature of the library environment in a modular and 
services manner.  Public user interface is merely one module, and not 
necessarily in scope of this design project; requirements of 
interoperability for user interfaces probably are, such as the efforts 
of the DLF ILS Discovery Interface Task Force.

And as Alex Johannsen pointed out before, there are plenty of examples 
of similar problems and alternative solutions outside the library 
industry that we currently face in our library systems environment.  In 
this way, we hope to collaborate with other Mellon-funded IT projects, 
like Sakai or Kuali, to re-use SOA vision, scope, or design that is 
common to the library environment.

And having attended the meeting in North Carolina, I can assure you that 
there is a diversity of project members, areas of expertise, positions 
of institutional authority, from large and small libraries, as well as 
individual and consortial libraries.  We hope that this will be 
representative of the greater library community, but nonetheless we will 
make regular public presentations to request and process your feedback.

The webcast next week is the first opportunity for us to present our 
efforts so far and for you all to respond then and over time.  I hope 
that you all can join us.

Cheers,
Tim

Tim McGeary
Senior Systems Specialist
Lehigh University
610-758-4998
tim.mcgeary_at_lehigh.edu
Google Talk: timmcgeary
Yahoo IM: timmcgeary

B.G. Sloan wrote:
> A quick question about the OLE Project. How will you go about getting
> user input?
> 
> One of the problems I usually see with library systems user interface
> design is that the design requirements are developed by a committee
> of librarians. This results in a user interface based on how
> librarians use library systems, rather than on how library users
> might use a system.
> 
> Bernie Sloan Sora Associates Bloomington, IN
> 
> --- On Wed, 9/24/08, Tim McGeary <tmm8_at_LEHIGH.EDU> wrote:
> 
>> From: Tim McGeary <tmm8_at_LEHIGH.EDU> Subject: [NGC4LIB] so let's
>> change the library environment: OLE Project Public Webcast To:
>> NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU Date: Wednesday, September 24, 2008, 2:52
>> PM I think what Alex Johannesen just said in the "Library 
>> Technologies and Library School (was Commercial Vendors and Open
>> Source Software)" is a great segue to inviting you all to join our
>> public webcast for the Open Library Environment (OLE) Project.
>> 
>> OLE Project participants will host a webcast to share information
>> about the project and invite comments and questions.  The webcast 
>> will be held Wednesday, October 1, 2008, 3pm-5pm EST. This webcast
>> is free or charge and open to anyone. Please register in advance
>> at:
>> 
>> http://survey.oit.duke.edu/ViewsFlash/servlet/viewsflash?cmd=showform&pollid=CIT!OLEWebcast
>> 
>> 
>> A more detailed agenda and information about logging into the
>> webcast will be posted within the next week.[1]
>> 
>> As Alex said:
>> 
>>> Libraries are probably best to change and compromise a
>> little. Just
>>> because you like to think in terms of stacks
>> doesn't mean you must
>>> have software that are written for stacks; shelves
>> will probably do.
>>> Just because you call your main users patrons
>> doesn't mean that a
>>> customer wouldn't do. And so on. For every problem
>> in the ILS you will
>>> find an outside alternative. This is a problem of not
>> wanting to
>>> change more than actually solving the problem.
>> This is very much the type of thinking and discussions we had in
>> North Carolina a couple weeks ago to kick off this design project.
>> We discussed what is in and out of scope for this project, started
>> training on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and began writing 
>> vision and scope documents to share with you all and the rest of
>> the library community to comment on.
>> 
>> I hope that you can join us in this webcast and continue to 
>> participate over the next year as we move forward on design the
>> Open Library Environment.
>> 
>> Cheers, Tim
>> 
>> [1]http://oleproject.org/2008/09/18/join-us-for-ole-project-update-via-webcast/
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- Tim McGeary Senior Systems Specialist Lehigh University 
>> 610-758-4998 tim.mcgeary_at_lehigh.edu Google Talk: timmcgeary Yahoo
>> IM: timmcgeary
> 
> 
> 
>