Nicole Engard last month posted about The State of our ILS, describing the systems as:
I’d say it’s a like the crazy cousin you have to deal with because he’s family! It doesn’t fit, we are a very open IT environment, we have applications all over that need to talk to each other nicely and the [ILS] is a brick wall preventing us from getting the information we need and sending the information we’d like.
Nicole’s point about interoperability is well put, and the post is part of her preparation for conversation and discussion she hopes will go on at the American Association of Law Libraries annual meeting in July.
Coincidentally, I’ll be at AALL next month. My presentation will focus on the things we can do once we overcome the problems Nicole describes, but my concordance with her point should be clear (see previous posts one, two, three).
Extra: When will people who want to improve things not feel as though the ILS is against them, as in this post by Steve Lawson?
update: I keep forgetting to link to this public example of how bad our OPACs/ILSs are. Thanks go to David Walker for making me ROTFL.