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Designing Future Library Systems

The National Library of Australia recently accepted an invitation to join an exciting new international partnership which will focus on the investigation of alternative open source library systems.

The Open Library Environment (OLE) Project is funded by a US$475 700 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through the Duke University Libraries. Its principal goal is the development of a design document foreshadowing an alternative to commercial Integrated Library System products.

‘This is a unique opportunity to build on a current undertaking to more thoroughly analyse our business processes,’ said Warwick Cathro, Assistant Director-General, Resource Sharing and Innovation at the Library. ‘We will be working with libraries in the United States and Canada to define what we need in the library systems of the future.’ In addition to its development of a design document, the OLE Project is intended to create a community of interest that could be tapped to build the planned system in a follow-on project.

Community Involvement

Leaders of the OLE Project, representing libraries in the United States, Canada, and Australia, will involve the library community in the design process through workshops, meetings, webcasts and online discussions. Through those activities, they will develop a plan for a library system that breaks away from an emphasis on print-based workflows, reflects the changing nature of library materials and new approaches to scholarly work, meshes well with other enterprise systems, and can be modified easily to suit the needs of different institutions. The project website at http://oleproject.org gives detailed information about the project and includes FAQs, recommended reading, and a comment section.

Participants

The National Library is joined on the OLE Project team by colleagues from Duke University, the University of Kansas, Lehigh University, the University of Pennsylvania, Library and Archives Canada, Vanderbilt University, the Orbis Cascade Alliance, Rutgers University, the University of Florida, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, the University of Maryland and Whittier College.

GetWise

Feeding into the OLE Project is another project with a catchy name—the GetWise Project (Gain Efficiencies Through Workflow Investigation and System Exploration). This internal Library project will run for 12 months to June 2009. Tools such as Business Process Modelling (BPM) will be used to analyse and review selected collection management and delivery processes to identify efficiencies. Open source and proprietary systems will also be investigated as modular add-ons to the Library’s current library management system. See ‘Open Source and the National Library of Australia Catalogue’ (Gateways, April 2008) on the adoption of the freely available open source product VuFind as the Library’s OPAC interface.

Carmel McInerny
Manager, GetWise Project