Library Automation – the Shape of Things to Come

Will Your Library Survive or Thrive?

by Graham Beastall, Managing Director, Soutron Limited

REPORT

With a dramatic economic shift already in progress and a likely move in political direction, 2010 is shaping up to be a year of change for the special and corporate library.

As cost consciousness continues to rule business decision making, we are once again likely to see a restructuring of the corporate landscape. And, unlike the fixed structure of the past, businesses will look for more flexible, solution-led working, in which people are selected to work together for a specific project, and then, once the task is complete, disbanded to reform around the next project.

In this dynamic structure, knowledge extraction and classification become critical factors and the library has the opportunity to become one of the few constructs in the corporate entity that can provide core continuity.

But with the internet accelerating expectations and change happening faster than at any time in the past ten years, librarians will have to find new ways to deliver additional services, at a lower cost.

Integration, The Secret To Survival

Integration will be the most significant change facing corporate librarians in 2010. As internal IT departments seek to streamline systems and improve efficiencies, corporate librarians will be expected to integrate their applications into the fabric of the company intranet or company website. Librarians who hitherto have considered their systems as separate and distinct functions will have the opportunity to become more integral to a company’s IT resources. The implications could be far reaching for the library, including the opportunity for the library to become a close partner with the IT department.

Librarians who can demonstrate more than a simple OPAC and offer the flexibility within their library systems to do more than store bibliographic data will find an ally. And a library with highly flexible database tools that can easily publish data in a different ways across internal web sites will be less vulnerable to budget scrutiny when software and systems are shared across departments.

Communication and Collaboration

Library automation in special libraries has remained pretty static for the past twenty years with functional modules remaining split between search and housekeeping functions. This will change as library managers open new channels of communication with users as they seek to maintain their status within the organisation. It will become a requirement to regularly update information following feedback from users. This will demand Web2.0. Critically, library managers will need to ensure that they are engaging users to justify their role and budgets in the corporation.

A New Relationship with Technology

Library systems have long been regarded as unfathomable by most IT managers and not without cause. Most libraries have been built on standards and technology that are foreign to the IT function.

Case Study Library automation systems built on older technologies, especially those using proprietary databases, support of this view. However, combined with a greater pressure to deliver more to users, breaking away from older technologies will help forge a closer alliance between the library and IT department.

Older Windows based systems will become increasingly expensive to maintain and, when compared with new systems, will be too complex to learn and operate. With diminishing training budgets and no time to spend away from daily tasks, applications will need to be more intuitive and easier to use than ever before with minimal training requirement.

Users will demand much higher levels of performance, including 24 x 7 x 365 access. Library applications that are built on modern database and web technologies such as SQL 2008 and .NET which means that data can be accessed from any location via a web browser at any time and allow closer integration with other systems.

Librarians who align the library’s technology with that of the rest of the organisation, making library science being available across the organisation in the form of flexible database repositories that knit information in the organisation together will reap the rewards.

The pressures in the economy will inhibit decisions to invest in new systems by corporate librarians. Library suppliers will have to re-think what markets they serve and how to present their solutions to allow the library to deliver more capability across the organisation with minimal investment.

The Inconvenient Truth About Open Source

Open Source Library Systems, initially delivered via the University Sector, are attracting attention as a way to procure low cost systems. Often these systems are perceived to offer greater control over the development process and lower costs. The idea that systems are “free” and liberating from a supplier dominated agenda is highly alluring.

Recent reports in the library press reveal the reality that the development process around Open Source systems is still driven by technical decisions and the costs are not any different from the traditional software procurement process.

Most commercial organisations rely on Microsoft as the technical backbone for the business. Their IT infrastructure is very solidly built around Microsoft skills. Introducing Open Source systems into this environment becomes an additional cost factor because supporting Unix based systems and MySQL databases is very different to supporting Microsoft SQL Server databases (it is like learning different languages).

Changing from one system to another involves a high level of resource allocation (money and staff time). Who in a corporate library has the time to negotiate development plans and functionality? Which Library Manager wants to become engaged in driving a software development process?

Some library managers will have system librarians working for them eager to grab hold of such a movement as Open Source. Open Source provides a vehicle for careers and places the individual managing it for a library in a community where their skills are highly valued. But as a business manager, the economic pressures will force the emphasis on service delivery.

Library managers need to seek out suppliers who already understand their needs and the pressures specific to their industries and who can deliver systems with pre-defined functionality without having to attend to a development cycle.

Serving users is more important than evangelising for open source library systems. ‘Free” software comes with increased levels of responsibility and involvement which, for most commercial librarians, will be too onerous. So although Open Source looks attractive at first glance, it quickly becomes less so when examined in the round.

Case Study More, More, More and Now

As well as the desire to catalogue and control other electronic resources, library systems will need to offer improved performance as they are compared with other web applications used within the company. And users will expect more from catalogues as comments, ratings and other web 2.0 features will find their way into systems.

The demand for higher system performance will, in part, arise from the greater emphasis on real time statistical analysis and reporting. Reporting in library application systems today is largely based on the manual selection and generation of a report by a system manager. In future, expect to see more reports generated by scheduled services and delivered directly to mail boxes at pre-defined times. This will mean more reports will be run and they will be personalised to specific users, placing greater loads on the server hardware requirements.

Third Party Integration

Integration with third party applications will be the biggest challenge facing library managers. The interaction with users and between users, capturing usage data and feeding that into corporate HR systems or eLearning systems will be increasingly sought after.

Much like the professional societies that sprang up in the 19th century, the internet will publish more and more but specialist “membership” societies will be sought out, as in the past, to validate knowledge and provide a guarantor of quality. Membership bodies will seek data integration to drive users to resources and resources to users in a transparent and seamless manner.

Knowledge managers will need to deliver new and varied information products in different ways to individuals and users as they become income producers.

The thesaurus, created and managed in the library will be used across the organisation. The LMS will be required to deliver information brands (products) quite different to a library system designed around a conventional OPAC. This will demand flexibility and a complex security model to allow targeting of data to appropriate audiences.

Embracing The Future

In response, even in challenging economic times, forward-thinking suppliers are finding the resources to develop new, web-based solutions, which take advantage of 64-bit operating systems and Microsoft SQL server 2008 relational database technologies. They will increasingly offer a one stop shop to librarians with fully managed systems, hosted from data centres with high availability and high bandwidth, including support and maintenance.

These single, cost effective arrangements, commonly known as SaaS (Software as a Service) simultaneously put the librarian at the centre of an organisation's future, relieve the pressure on IT resources while integrating with applications across the organisation and offering a seamless service to users.

And, like a previous generation of librarians who embraced the emergent PC industry in the 1980s, forward-looking librarians today will seize this opportunity to ensure that their library doesn't just survive but thrives the coming changes to the corporate landscape.

The second part of this report, Library Automation - The Shape of Things to Come, are you ready for the 7 technologies that w ill change the way you manage your library? Will be published in the CILIP Buyers' Guide published in January 2010.