Rethinking the ILS

Marshall Breeding in "Re-Integrating the Integrated Library System" and Sai Deng in "Beyond the OPAC" both cite Google in explaining the need to improve library information systems, and, although they differ in how they approach the problem, both offer compelling solutions.

Breeding takes a broader view, looking at the ILS as a whole and describing its history from the 1970s, when it offered a near-complete automation of library functions. But as Breeding notes, the ILS came of age when libraries only had print materials, and it was never really updated to account for the ever-increasing number of digital materials in a library's collection. This has necessitated numerous add-ons such as link resolvers, metasearch products, and electronic resource management applications. While these are all adequate to meet the need of processing digital content, and in fact allow for customization of an ILS, Breeding notes that constructing this patchwork of ILS plus assorted add-ons requires "a lot of planning, design, and coordination"--that is, it is labor-intensive. 

The obvious solution--creating an ILS that incorporates the functionalities of all of these add-ons--is cost-prohibitive, Breeding concedes. Rather, he envisions an improvement to the ILS-plus-add-on framework: indeed, as these supplements are still fairly new, it will just take some time and adjustments before it is more workable. Either way, as Breeding notes, users will demand improvement, and with Google and Amazon's simple interfaces just one click away, libraries have no choice but to comply.

Deng agrees that Google's interface is much better than most libraries', and approaches improvement strictly with regard to the OPAC: while Breeding looks at the ILS as a whole, Deng examines only the OPAC component, and uses the example of Google and Yahoo's personalization of interfaces and a case study of a collection web site to argue for more personalization of OPAC interfaces.

Deng describes the process of creating a web site for specialized data within an ILS--in this case faculty-produced literature at Wichita State University. While the steps to create an initial web site are numerous and complicated, Deng notes that once the initial site has been constructed, altering it to create yet another tailored site is much simpler. These subsequent sites can be customized by language, user type, library type, author, subject, or topic. The advantages--"better web presentation, easier discovery, and greater user attention"--are hard to dismiss.

Wichita State University's Faculty Research Showcase

Both Deng and Breeding offer solutions to the challenges Google, Amazon, and Yahoo have posed for libraries, and both have merit: while Breeding's argument to keep improving what we have works on the large scale, Deng's suggestion to do what we can to enhance the OPAC is a more focused approach.