I’d be excited just to be a fly on the wall at code4lib, but I’m on a bit of a mission to change the architecture of our library software — to make it more hackable, and make those hacks more sharable — so I had to propose a talk.

Title: What Blog Applications Can Teach Us About Library Software Architecture

Description: The number of programmers in the library world is growing and our individual efforts have shown great promise, but they exist largely as a spectacle that few libraries can enjoy. We need better means to aggregate our efforts and share solutions that can be employed by libraries without programming staff.

We must look outside libraries. The blog world is rich with non-programmers using (maintaining and configuring) blog applications like WordPress or Moveable Type (or others) while thousands of developers are adding functionality via plugins and themes. What lessons can we learn from this and how might an OPAC built from those lessons work?

The idea here is that lots of people are blogging, and a good number of them have figured out how to install and maintain their blog management software — even installing plugins and tweaking templates. What lessons can we, as a community of library programmers, learn from that?

Yes, I’m working on a project along these lines, but it’s not yet ready for public consumption. You’ll see more about this in future posts, and if you’ve been watching, you might have picked up on it in previous posts.

library, libraries, library 2.0, library20, lib20, code4lib, system architecture, reusable code, common platform, system design, software design, software architecture, library software, library systems

I hadn’t seen Ryan Eby’s post at LibDev that connected ILSs with WordPress before I posted that library catalogs should be like WordPress here. It connects with a my comment on a post at Meredith Farkas’ Information Wants To Be Free. My comment there goes in two directions, but I’d like to focus on the technology side now.

Our vendors will inevitably bend to our demands and add small features here and there, but even after that, we’ll still be stuck paying enormous amounts of money for systems that remain fundamentally flawed. Technology marches on, and inevitably we’ll find some new way to use our catalog data. John Blyberg is talking about this in his ILS customer bill of rights post, and that’s what I was getting at when I say the catalog should be like WordPress.

Meredith asks for more programmers, but as a programmer, I’m asking for her help in demanding smart software design from our vendors.

tags: future of the opac, catalog data, coders wanted, future, future of libraries, future of library catalogs, future of the ils, libraries, library, library 2.0, library catalog, library catalogs, library technology, library20, opac, programmers wanted, smart software, software design