We have just made one of the key project documents freely available on Googledocs. ‘The Library Services Platform Context – Key resources informing the JISC ‘LMS Change’ synthesis project’ paper positions the trends in library system development in the wider context.  It takes the form of a review to inform the work of the LMS Change synthesis project. The narrative summarises trends under five broad headings:-

1. The Big Picture – Underlying Themes
2. Higher Education
3. Library Technology
4. Library Systems
5. User Experience & Behaviour

It focus higher education (HE) libraries and specifically ‘back-end’ resource *management* systems – the ‘library service platforms’ as they are increasingly becoming known, in Higher Education. The document began life as a simple resource list for the project and has evolved into a kind of bibliographic essay. It’s mostly ‘big picture’ stuff (after all my role is as a member of the team  working on the ‘synthesis’ part) but it also has illustrative detail from some of the specific projects in the JISC programme. It’s not intended to be comprehensive but we hope it will be useful in illustrating a coherent argument with some select, and we trust, well chosen references.

I certainly think it’s important to see the development in library systems in context. There was a time when people spoke of ‘stand alone’ library systems but those days are long gone. Library system vendors (almost all now owned by or part of much bigger enterprises) are working to reflect in their offerings major technology trends such as the cloud, big data/analytics, social media and the changes in consumption brought about in part by devices such as smartphones and tablets.

This is a challenging and fascinating time for libraries and library technology and I hope the document will help make better sense of what is going on. We’d love to have your comments

Ken Chad. Ken Chad Consulting Ltd  www.kenchadconsulting.com

Updates from the Pathfinder project blogs:

• The Anthologizr project reported that they are close to releasing a live version of their user interface, pending a few last minute which they hope to tame very soon.
• The Benefits of Sharing project published a write up of their October LMS Day event where more than thirty library staff from across Scotland convened to discuss the possibilities and practicalities of a shared LMS for Scotland. The write-up reports “a great interest in and enthusiasm for the idea of a shared LMS” among those present.
• The Collaborative Collection Management (CCM) project shared the practical findings of the collections comparison work they’ve been carrying out, with a reminder that establishing uniqueness and de-duplicating records can be a far from straightforward task. They also posted a video of Christine Wise’s Pecha Kucha from last month’s RLUK Conference which gives a brilliantly clear overview of the CCM project and their project’s connection with the wider academic research ecosystem.

• The HIKE project team have been shedding some light on the numbers behind their e-resources collection, and also grappling with how some of their complex processes can best be translated into KB+ and 360 Resource Manager workflows:
  - Core titles
  - Journal subscriptions and renewals
  - Patron Driven Acquisition

Updates from the wider world of the LMS Change programme:

Andrew Preater blogged about the strategic significance of the Bloomsbury LMS Consortium’s selection of Kuali OLE as their next library management system. The Bloomsbury LMS project posted an in-depth report on the horizon scan that contributed to their procurement decision making process. Andrew also tweeted this link to an interesting blogpost from the Kuali Ole project:

Some next-gen LMS RFP / specification food for thought from the Kuali Ole project – via my last RT of @benshowers. bit.ly/UCz2Z7

— Andrew Preater (@preater) November 19, 2012

In addition to that, Richard Nurse blogged about the SCONUL Kuali OLE seminar he attended. And finally, just as I was about to hit publish on this blogpost, a video message has arrived from the future Ben Showers revealing what the digital library user experience will be in 2020.

Selected highlights from the past month on Twitter:

ebooks in academic institutions: management/ ‘curation’ (prelim) outputs from a JISC project seminar. Project blog ow.ly/fiAwT

— Ken Chad (@KenChad) November 15, 2012

“A New Chapter Begins: Books at JSTOR Launches” | About JSTOR j.mp/UIOZNF

— James Neal (@james3neal) November 16, 2012

Watching the birth of a digital preservation problem: @petecliff‘s blogpost on ebook problems past & presentopenplanetsfoundation.org/blogs/2012-11-…

— Maureen Pennock (@mopennock) November 19, 2012

Emerging Trends in ICT Identified at #WSIS Forum 2012 bit.ly/TfyLzn via @gitanjalisah

— Jaume Fortuny (@fortuny) November 21, 2012

RT @carenmilloy:Open Access eBooks – 5 Part Series | iLibrarian – bit.ly/TgQAxQ

— Simon Bains (@simonjbains) November 22, 2012

What is an “enhanced” ebook? My answer: commoncraft.com/what-enhanced-… #AofE

— Common Craft (@CommonCraft) November 26, 2012

Some great stats RT @philbradleyVery useful Pew Presentation on the changing world of libraries. ow.ly/fFRRY

— Ned Potter (@theREALwikiman) November 29, 2012

*Excellent piece by @lorcand*; 13 Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery, & the Catalog: Scale, Workflow, Attention. j.mp/UVMziA

— Jill ONeill (@jillmwo) December 13, 2012

The SCONUL Winter Conference (7 December 2012 – London) was provocatively entitled ‘New Teams for a New Era’. That’s a very relevant headline for the LMS Change project, which is concerned about the skills implicated in new generations of library management systems, in pressures for enterprise scale integration and in interaction with the wider information landscape and its service platforms. So here is a relevant snapshot of the debate at the conference …

This post was jointly authored by Oliver Pritchard (Asst Director for Student & Learning Support at the University of Sunderland) and by David Kay (LMS Change project). Whilst touching on themes explored more widely in the conference, it draws principally on the discussion that took place in the ‘Boundaries of the Library’ workshop.

Core Questions?

The workshop identified some headline discussion points which given time constraints and the wide ranging nature of the discussion, were not all addressed in detail. However there was considerable value in charting them to aid future thinking and discussion.

• Identifying trends affecting skills, currently and prospectively on the horizon
• Mapping the landscape of our services (supply and demand, within the institution and beyond)
• Understanding who has a stake in ownership / operation of our services, and in particular whether these services are local to the library / elsewhere in the institution / outsourced / shared
• Ascertaining whether it makes sense anymore to talk about ‘library’ skills – and, if so, defining the distinguishing characteristics and articulating the reinforcing advocacy
• Consequently defining where / what are the skills gaps – recognising that whilst these may be technical (driven by the pervasiveness and cadence of technology change), there may be other ways of addressing this problem space, even when focused on library systems

A free flowing discussion challenged the framework for the workshop and moved to identify and address broader, but valuable themes.

Trends – What are the key trends that might determine or influence our landscape?

A wide-ranging discussion centred on two key examples:

• Outsourcing: by example – distributed and hosted services, services direct to the user, beyond our management or control (e.g. Google search; MOOCs), services with user input and choice including “crowdsourcing” (e.g. Patron Driven Acquisition; recommenders and networks such as Mendeley). This trend may broadly be described as “disintermediation” to capture that varied and distributed model of service type and delivery. The group concluded that there were in fact, probably, degrees of disintermediation at play, though not yet complete or wholesale and rarely beyond the reference frame of the library in terms of mission and skills.

• Student Experience: the learning journey was identified as a key driver and one in which libraries played a central part and could be/are key influencers and stakeholders. There was some debate regarding validity of adopting a customer/consumer/retail model, based on differing views on the nature of the student/learning transaction and whether this was truly a consumer model. However, there was some agreement that more thought should perhaps be given to the needs of our service users, and the means of listening to their voice and understanding their preferences and behaviours.

Skills – What are the skills that our services need to manage a changing landscape?

There was broad agreement that, in terms of critical success factors, these crystallised around a set of attitudinal and behavioural attributes, typically borne of a core responsibly for the mediation of information working with a considerable range of users in a variety of settings and involving the creation of critical links with a wide variety of internal and external stakeholders. A set of key attributes emerged from the tenor of this discussion:

• Brokerage
• Facilitation
• Mediation
• Agency
• Collaboration
• Bringing order to innovation and opportunism

These were identified as key ways of working which place the library team in an important position in the institution vis a vis both ‘customer’ service and corporate enablement. These were therefore expressed as differentiating characteristics for the library service that needed to be imbued in our leadership and in the approaches adopted by our teams.

This offered an important perspective on technical skills (perhaps a wrongly assumed focus of this debate). Whilst such skills were seen as significant to service success and corporate agility, it was suggested that technical skills will always change (sometimes rapidly – consider such as web frameworks, metadata transport formats) and might be bought in rather than as a default developed “in-house”.

In conclusion – A 2020 vision?

Let us assume, perhaps within the decade, that the primacy of buildings is ultimately challenged by the potential to distribute and personalise learning at scale and that print collections become largely specialist legacy concerns. In such a landscape characterised by the greater distribution of learning and support services, what knowledge and skills will remain as relevant, as core and potentially as premium for our library-like services?

It was argued that the skills characterised in our discussion – a set of complex attributes, higher level skills intertwined with core professional values – can help optimise our opportunity to survive in and crucially to shape an increasingly uncertain and fast changing world of teaching, learning and research. In the context of these fundamental observations about the ‘library team’ in a new era, the enabling technology skills required to manage and evolve library services were understood to be crucially important, almost a given, to be identified and developed as a part of core business.

Highlights, lowlights and what next
Guest Blogger: Sharon Penfold, Bloomsbury LMS Project Manager (Project website: www.blms.ac.uk/)
Report from BIC’s Battle of the Library Systems, 28 November 2012 

The House Motion: “Open source is about distributed innovation and will become the dominant way of producing software”

Over 40 delegates were presented with a well-paced set of cases for and against using open source software.

There were no surprises, and this wasn’t so much a battle as a mostly civilised debate. Overall, excellent points were made by all parties, and all appeared to have fair floorspace.

The open team was fundamentally higher education related; the proprietary team fundamentally public library. A more equal balance of academic and public, open source and proprietary will be needed to robustly explore the themes raised – but I suspect would add little new at a high level apart from equal representation.

As more of the content is covered elsewhere, I would just like to highlight a few more strategic aspects – and flag the question, what next?

Public libraries v Higher Education

An interesting division condensed during the ‘Battle’ – nothing to do with technology, everything to do with public library and council culture compared with that of higher education.

Public libraries were presented on the proprietary side as truly driven by risk avoidance and the legal safety net of Service Level Agreements and contracts.

A culture of innovation and responsiveness in higher education was the strongest theme on the open source front.

Does this imply a very simple market shift so that providers and suppliers most sensitive to public library drivers make the most of their market strengths there – and similarly for higher education?

Badges and solutions

A particularly constructive proprietary angle came from Jim Burton of Axiell, emphasising that the important decisions should be made based on the system doing what you want and meeting your needs – not on badges of open source or otherwise.

At the other end of the scale on the proprietary side was the illustrated limerick “William McGee and the car built for free”. This likened OSS to the result of a bunch of enthusiasts building a car, so ending up with a multi-coloured ad-hoc monstrosity.

Said limerick however did highlight an important point. Development of open source systems does require robust underpinnings to mitigate the risk that it traditionally brings.

Risk

However, where proprietary suppliers are concerned, the risk argument is a double edged sword.

Building their customer base purely on fear, uncertainty and doubt aligned with extreme risk mitigation is not a 21^st century partnership way of working.

It’s certainly not a 21^st century higher education way of working.

It’s even less about the driver that really matters in universities in the current climate – student experience.

Successful risk management is understanding the appetite of the organisation in the first place, and working within that strategic and operational context.

Where next?

Simplistically, confusion reigns at present. Votes before and after the battle were significantly split between for, against and undecided. Many would have spoiled their ballot papers in their uncertainty. They are not remotely alone.

Constructive and balanced approaches to selecting fit for purpose solutions will be needed to support the organisations seeking next generation library technology. Proprietary or open source in that context is irrelevant.

For a wider viewpoint, recommended are:
Mick Fortune’s summing up: www.mickfortune.com/Wordpress/?p=963
Andrew Preater’s commentary: www.preater.com/2012/12/01/free-and-open-source-software-and-distributed-innovation/

PRESENTERS

Open Team
Nick Dimant (PTFS)
Mark Hughes (Swansea)
David Parkes (Staffordshire)
Andrew Preater (Senate House)

Proprietary Team
Will Blackburn (Civica)
Jim Burton (Axiell)
Paula Keogh (Capita)
Anthony Whitford (Capita)
Brad Whittle (SirsiDynix)

Facilitators
Mick Fortune (consultant)
Karina Luke (BIC)
Martin Palmer (Essex County Council)

Time passes quickly and we’re now half way through the JISC LMS Change project (july 2012 to February 2013). You’ll remember, of course, that the project is undertaking three activities that we hope (as if by magic) to bring together in the second half of the project:

• Synthesis of the landscape and associated developments in library systems and the wider world of access to scholarly information; this is being tracked in an evolving paper edited by Ken Chad of which Version 2 will be published here this month
• Identification of key findings, approaches and developments arising from the programme’s Pathfinder projects, assisted Helen Harrop’s blog posts
• Development of a ‘framework’ / ‘model’ that will help libraries to think about and plan around potential changes in library systems and associated processes – the main subject of this post

The project has active support from a Collaboration Group of eight universities (intentionally diverse in terms of mission, size and location) in steering this course – for which our thanks go to Birkbeck, Cambridge, the Open University, Stirling, Swansea, UCL, Westminster and Wolverhampton.

The eight libraries (and associated consortia such as Bloomsbury and WHELF) are currently helping us test the emerging ‘change framework’ using a simple experimental method … Each library has posed a particular systems change issue or ‘challenge’ that they are currently facing (from a complex detail to whole LMS replacement) and we’re meeting together to see whether the proposed approaches to problem scoping, solution modelling and thought provoking are helpful.

The selected issues for testing the framework have included

• Authentication challenges
• Cloud-based library system issues
• E-resource license management
• LMS implementation
• Next generation LMS points of integration
• Reading / resource List processes
• Web-scale versus local search indexes

On Wednesday 21 November, the Collaboration Group will be meeting to test the ‘framework’ with a challenge of interest to a large number of libraries – the implications for institutional library systems of adopting the KB+ shared service (service.kbplus.ac.uk). We’ll he joined in the discussion by Huddersfield’s HIKE project (library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/projects/hike/ – for which KB+ is a core interest) and by JISC Collections (leading KB+ service development). Look out for our blog post on the meeting!

We’re also grateful of support from the US-based Kuali OLE consortium. Their interest is to identify thinking and planning approaches that will help any library in considering large scale systems change (kualiole.tumblr.com/post/32887237076/rethinking-the-rfp). Kuali partner, the University of Chicago plans to put our approach to the test in the new year as (like the UK Bloomsbury group) they’ll be an early implementer of the Kuali OLE platform.

Updates from the Pathfinder project blogs:

• Richard Davis (Project Manager) presented the Anthologizr project and talked about e-books at the Future of Technology in Education conference last month.
• The Huddersfield Intota, KnowledgeBase+ Evaluation (HIKE) project have been doing some deep thinking about change management in relation to their project and also sharing some good news about ONIX-PL integration with 360 Resource Manager which should make their life much easier on the data loading front.

And a roundup of news from further afield:

• The Bloomsbury Library Management System Consortium (who are part of the LMS Change Collaboration Group) have announced that they have decided “in principle” to use the open source Kuali OLE software to deliver their shared LMS service.
• Andrew Preater has written a great blogpost covering the talk he and Liz Jolly gave at LibraryCamp last month – the topic of their talk was ‘Free and Open Software and Cultural Change’ which ties in nicely with the HIKE blogpost I mentioned above.
• Gartner’s ‘top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013′ is unlikely to raise too many eyebrows but the ‘Personal Cloud’ trend that they highlight strikes me as a very useful model for envisaging the ‘out there’, decoupled access to resources and information that library users may increasingly expect in the future. [via @benshowers]
• In other cloud-related news, Bucknell University in the US recently moved their library system into the cloud and are now using OCLC’s Worldshare Platform. [via @KenChad]
• Ken Chad also shared news that more than 10% of UK HE libraries are currently reviewing their library systems.
• Mirela Roncevic has put out a call for feedback on her forthcoming report for ALA TechSource on library e-book platforms and has already attracted some interesting comments.

Some highlights from the blogs of the Pathfinder projects over the past month:

• The Anthologizr project has created a chronology of e-books which charts their evolution across four ‘epochs’. The chronology allows the Anthologizr team to quickly identify whether a research report is likely to be useful depending on which e-book epoch it was published in.
• The Copac Collection Management project has blogged about their key success criteria for each of the strands of activity within their project.
• The HIKE project blog has been a hive of activity over the past few weeks, including the following posts:
  • An explanation of how the Techniques for Electronic Resource Management (TERMS) project relates to HIKE and an invitation to contribute e-resource workflow documents to the TERMS wiki.
  • An analysis of their acquisitions workflow to identify important factors for Serial Solutions to consider when developing Intota and for Huddersfield to bear in mind when they are evaluating the suitability of Intota.
  • A wish list for Intota’s acquisitions process which takes into account the results of their analysis work in the blogpost mentioned above. Their list includes integration with the university’s finance