There's perhaps no better way for tech-minded librarians to kick off Midwinter than to hear the top stakeholders at the biggest library tech vendors (for-profit, not-for-profit, open-source, commercial) talk about their products and projects in the context of what direction they're driving the industry. The topic for this three-hour, 20th-anniversary seminar was "Forces of change sweep across the library automation landscape: business and technology partnerships, foundation and government funding, non-profits versus for-profits," a title almost as long as the session itself and sufficiently broad to capture a range of discussions throughout the seminar, but the panelists, who had several hundred years of industry experience among them, continued to emphasize one thing: as forces of change sweep across the industry, innovation should not be replaced by reinvention.
Sitting on the panel were top-level representatives from the likes of Auto-Graphics, Equinox, Ex Libris, Innovative Interfaces, OCLC, Sky River, Serials Solutions, Polaris, SirsiDynix, TLC, VTLS, Evergreen, and PTFS, who just announced it would acquire LibLime. LibLime's Josh Ferraro was notably absent, "in his hotel room counting money," quipped RMG President Rob McGee. Sitting below these vendors was a reactor panel of sorts: Mary Anne Hodel from Orange County (Fla.) County Library, Lyrasis's Catherine Wilt, and Marshall Breeding from Vanderbilt University.
Breeding, who came to discuss the Open Library Environment, a Mellon-funded project just entering its "build" phase, quickly became the center of some heated retorts from the vendors at the top when he suggested that OLE would reinvent library automation. Reinventing the 30-plus years of automation that these companies have established would throw the baby out with the bathwater, they seemed unanimously to suggest. And besides, they argued, their businesses all depend on developing according to their customers' needs, so they questioned how this grant-funded research is any different than the R&D they're already doing.
OLE needs to be "open not only in name but in mindset–must be open across the board," said Carl Grant, president of Ex Libris North American. "I've found the OLE project to be a little closed at times."
The panel and commentators were quick to point out some problems with open source software. Robert Wilson, an administrator at Claremont University Consortium, emphasized that their decisions about software solutions are not based on whether it's open source. "When we buy technology, it's a business decision," he said. He argued that librarians spend too much time on debates like this one, and not enough time talking about why library technology becomes increasingly marginalized in universities as a whole, possibly because "we spend too much time coordinating and not enough time innovating."
"Not to burst anybody's bubble," said OCLC's Andrew Pace, "but we don't need a next generation OPAC . . . we need a solution." And for this panel, that solution seemed to center on enhancing the way patrons discover objects in the collection–not reinventing back-end systems.
