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Interesting blog post about an ExLibris presentation at ELUNA '08 about their strategy for a URM (=unified resource management) which would be a modular replacement for their existing ILS. Sounds like an ambitious timeline. Not clear whether this is a replacement for Voyager or Aleph or both or neither.
"The DLF Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI) Phase 2 Steering Group has been investigating interoperability between integrated library system acquisition modules and electronic resource management systems for the last 18 months. In January 2007 the ERMI2 subcommittee charged with this work released a draft report for comment.
The subcommittee is now pleased to make available the final report of this investigation, available from . The release will also be announced this week at the 2008 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia."
Earlier this year, the Internet Archive gathered a small group of people in San Francisco to discuss whether this was possible. Could we build something so grand? We concluded that we could. We located a copy of the Library of Congress card catalog, phoned publishers and asked them for their data, created a brand new database infrastructure for handling millions of dynamic records, wrote a new type of wiki that lets users enter structured data, set up a search engine to look through it all, and made the resulting site look good.
We hooked it up to the Internet Archive's book scanning project, so that you can read the full text of all the out-of-copyright books they've made available. And we hope to add a print-on-demand feature, so that you can get nice paper copies of these scanned books, as well as a scan-on-demand feature, so you can fund the scanning of that out-of-copyright book you've always loved.
But we can only do so much on our own. Hopefully we've done enough to make it clear that this project is for real—not simply another pie-in-the-sky idea—but we need your help to make it a reality. So we're opening up the demo we've built so far, opening up the source code, opening up the mailing lists, and hoping you'll join us in building Open Library. It sure is going to be a fun ride.
—Aaron Swartz and the Open Library team, 16 July 2007
We hooked it up to the Internet Archive's book scanning project, so that you can read the full text of all the out-of-copyright books they've made available. And we hope to add a print-on-demand feature, so that you can get nice paper copies of these scanned books, as well as a scan-on-demand feature, so you can fund the scanning of that out-of-copyright book you've always loved.
But we can only do so much on our own. Hopefully we've done enough to make it clear that this project is for real—not simply another pie-in-the-sky idea—but we need your help to make it a reality. So we're opening up the demo we've built so far, opening up the source code, opening up the mailing lists, and hoping you'll join us in building Open Library. It sure is going to be a fun ride.
—Aaron Swartz and the Open Library team, 16 July 2007
Zebra is a high-performance, general-purpose structured text indexing and retrieval engine. It reads structured records in a variety of input formats (eg. email, XML, MARC) and allows access to them through exact boolean search expressions and relevance-ranked free-text queries.
Zebra supports large databases (more than ten gigabytes of data, tens of millions of records). It supports incremental, safe database updates on live systems. You can access data stored in Zebra using a variety of Index Data tools (eg. YAZ and PHP/YAZ) as well as commercial and freeware Z39.50 clients and toolkits.
Zebra is free software, available under the GPL license. It may be used by anyone without charge. If you wish to incorporate Zebra into a commercial software distribution, please contact us about alternative licenses.
Zebra supports large databases (more than ten gigabytes of data, tens of millions of records). It supports incremental, safe database updates on live systems. You can access data stored in Zebra using a variety of Index Data tools (eg. YAZ and PHP/YAZ) as well as commercial and freeware Z39.50 clients and toolkits.
Zebra is free software, available under the GPL license. It may be used by anyone without charge. If you wish to incorporate Zebra into a commercial software distribution, please contact us about alternative licenses.
Austrailian document on the future of collaborative cataloging.
"The DLF has convened a working group to analyze issues involved in integrating integrated library systems
(ILS's) and discovery systems, and to create a technical proposal for accomplishing such integration.
(ILS's) and discovery systems, and to create a technical proposal for accomplishing such integration.
We hope to engage the expertise and interest of the community beyond this working group, however. Towards this end, we have set up a Wiki for the project, much of which is open to public viewing and comment"
Marshall Breeding's visual guide to the history of of ILS vendors and mergers/acquisitions