Carmel McInerny of the National Library of Australia gave a very interesting talk on “The Open Library Environment (OLE) Project” and other open source initiatives at the National Library on Thursday 5 March. She described the change in the National Librarys (NLA) approach from tendering for the market to provide a solution to use of open source software.
She is the NLA representative on the OLE project which is a Mellon funding project to seek an open source library management system for large libraries (as opposed to small library solutions such as Koha or Evergreen). She quoted Eric Lease Morgan: “Library catalogues need to provide an increased number of services against content not just services against the index”. Referring to the implementation of an approach based on service oriented architecture and business profess mapping she noted that while OLE was at an early stage planning design documents, the benefits would be tremendous.
The advantages of collaboration mean that the models can be carefully thought out and designed. She also talked about using RefTracker and other tool kits (open source and off the shelf) to manage original material acquisitions, the NLA implementation of VU-find for catalogue access (with relevance ranking and facets), Internet Archive „flipbed‟ software for page turning and word searching for digitised printed materials and a project she is leading called GETWISE – gain efficiencies through workflow investigation and system exploration. It was a terrific presentation, providing much food for though for both digital solutions and workflow analysis (business process mapping).
A very interesting and informative presentaiton!
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