Code4lib

Warning, to those of you not librarians, this has a lot of library stuff.

For the past couple of days I have been hitting the Code4lib conference here at OSU. It was a pretty big deal with people from all over the country, Canada, and Europe. A lot of it was about programing and the plumbing that works behind the stuff that I normally see so, much of it went over my head. But it is good to hear about this stuff because it begins to make sense after a while. The keynote was from a group from Georgia who are developing an open source Integrated Library System (ILS) for the public libraries there. It looked pretty nice. They were not getting the service they wanted from their vendor and they didn't think the system could scale up to the size of the database they hoped to create. The system would be mounted on one server system and would manage centrally around 8 million records. It made me think about the QuadLinc system. There aren't that many systems around the country that run like that. The speakers talked about how they sold it to the Georgia legislature by emphasizing how having a central sytem saves all the local libraries so much money. I certainly knew what they were talking about. The QuadLinc system really saved St. Ambrose a lot of money. It is hard to convince others how well it can work. I also wondered how well the QuadLinc software would scale up when they expand across northern Illinois.

What I really wonder about is how I am starting to hear about people making big changes to the online system catalogs. First there was the recent buzz about the North Carolina State University home grown catalog. Now this "Evergreen" system and the group catalogs that OCLC is doing around the country. I think that more and more people are going to be producing systems like I saw at Universitat Freiburg. There they had three separate systems that each were designed specifically for their function but would talk together. It seemed to solve the problem where the commercial ILS's try to do so much and library staff have to put up with compromises. There are probably others who are developing homegrown systems. Its kind of funny that originally libraries designed there own systems, like Ohio, Illinois, and California. Then the commercial vendors created systems that could do more and had all the bells and whistles. Now we may be seeing new technology enabling libraries to solve their own problems again.

The conference was very successful. Jeremy Frumkin from the OSU Libraries put it together.