This posting documents my experience at Open Library Environment (OLE) project workshop that took place at the University of Chicago, December 11, 2008. In a sentence, the workshop provided an opportunity to describe and flowchart a number of back-end library processes in an effort to help design an integrated library system.
What is OLE
 full-scale gargoyle |
As you may or may not know, the Open Library Environment is a Mellon-funded initiative in cooperation with a growing number of academic libraries to explore the possibilities of building an integrated library system. Since this initiative is more about library back-end and business processes (acquisitions, cataloging, circulation, reserves, ILL, etc.), it is complimentary to the the eXtensible Catalog (XC) project which is more about creating a “discovery” layer against and on top of existing integrated library system’s public access interfaces.
Why OLE?
Why do this sort of work? There are a few reasons. First, vendor consolidation makes the choices of commercial solutions few. Not a good idea; we don’t like monopolies. Second, existing applications do not play well with other (campus) applications. Better integration is needed. Third, existing library systems are designed for print materials, but with the advent of greater and greater amounts of electronic materials the pace of change has been inadequate and too slow.
OLE is an effort to help drive and increase change in Library Land, and this becomes even more apparent when you consider all of the Mellon-related library initiatives it is supporting: Portico (preservation), JSTOR and ArtSTOR (collections), XC (discovery), OLE (business processes/technical services).
The day’s events
The workshop took place at the Regenstein Library (University of Chicago). There were approximately thirty or forty attendees from universities such as Grinnell, Indiana, Notre Dame, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, and of course, Chicago.
After being given a short introduction/review of what OLE is and why, we were broken into four groups (cataloging/authorities, circulation/reserves/ILL, acquisitions, and serials/ERM), and we were first asked to enumerate the processes of our respective library activities. We were then asked to classify these activities into four categories: core process, shifting/changing process, processes that could be stopped, and processes that we wanted but don’t have. All of us, being librarians, were not terribly surprised by the enumerations and classifications. The important thing was to articulate them, record them, and compare them with similar outputs from other workshops.
After lunch (where I saw the gargoyle and made a few purchases at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore) we returned to our groups to draw flowcharts of any of our respective processes. The selected processes included checking in a journal issue, checking in an electronic resource, keeping up and maintaining a file of borrowers, acquiring a firm order book, cataloging a rare book, and cataloging a digital version of a rare book. This whole flowcharting process was amusing since the workflows of each participants’ library needed to be amalgamated into a single processes. “We do it this way, and you do it that way.” Obviously there is more than one way to skin a cat. In the end the flowcharts were discussed, photographed, and packaged up to ship back to the OLE home planet.
What do you really want?
The final, wrap-up event of the day was a sharing and articulation of what we really wanted in an integrated library system. “If there one thing you could change, then what would it be?” Based on my notes, the most popular requests were:
- make the system interoperable with sets of APIs (4 votes)
- allow the system to accommodate multiple metadata formats (3 votes)
- include a robust reporting mechanism; give me the ARL Generate Statistics Button (2 votes)
- implement a staff interface allowing work to be done without editing records (2 votes)
- implement consortial borrowing across targets (2 votes)
- separate the discovery processes from the business processes (2 votes)
Other wish list items I thought were particularly interesting included: integrating the collections process into the system, making sure the application was operating system independent, and implementing Semantic Web features.
Summary
I’m glad I had the opportunity to attend. It gave me a chance to get a better understanding of what OLE is all about, and I saw it as a professional development session where I learned more about where things are going. The day’s events were well-structured, well-organized, and manageable given the time restraints. I only regret there was too little “blue skying” by attendees. Much of the time was spent outlining how our work is done now. I hope any future implementation explores new ways of doing things in order to take better advantage of the changing environment as opposed to simply automating existing processes.