future of libraries

Jenny Levine’s Online Library User Manifesto

Drawing from John Blyberg‘s ILS Customer’s Bill of Rights and The Social Customer Manifesto, Jenny Levine offers this Online Library User Manifesto: I want to have a say, so you need to provide mechanisms for this to happen online.   I want to know when something is wrong, and what you’re going to do to […] » about 300 words

Educause on Future of Libraries

Take a look at this editorial by Jerry D. Campbell, CIO and Dean of University Libraries at the University of Southern California: Academic libraries today are complex institutions with multiple roles and a host of related operations and services developed over the years. Yet their fundamental purpose has remained the same: to provide access to […] » about 300 words

Raging Arguments About The Future Of The ILS

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.