Library Systems as Services
Library Systems as Services
Lorcan Dempsey has a good post
on his weblog talking about he idea of library systems (metasearch,
resolver, e-reserves, ERM, ILL) being delivered as services. Recently,
I started advocating that consortia should look into become ASPs
(application service providers) for some of these systems. Centralizing
this type of support has the potential to
yield tremendous cost savings. Additionally, it could save smaller
academic libraries (particularly at community colleges, technical
colleges and even smaller 4yr colleges) a great deal of money.
The greatest problem with all of these systems is that they need
staff to maintain and support them; sometimes on a very technical
level. Smaller libraries often do not possess this expertise nor can
they get assistance for this from their campus IT staff. Even if campus
IT staff offer support, they do not understand the library aspect of
these systems, which creates a multitude of headaches.
In the last four years, SUNY Cortland has added three new library
systems that require some level of support. Additionally, we would like
to implement a federated search tool. These additional web-based systems are
one reason that my job changed from library webmaster to electronic
services librarian.
However, not all libraries have this flexibility
with staffing. The result is that libraries are truly caught in a vice.
One side of the vice is the demand of users for these services, many of
which truly enhance the users experience. The other side of the vice is
the cost of these resources both from licensing and equipment
standpoint and a staffing standpoint.
Ironically, vendors have caught on to the fact that some libraries
don't possess the staffing to deal with these systems and have started
to act as ASPs themselves and charge a pretty penny for the service.
Caught between in the vice libraries are forking over the cash stealing
these funds from other places in the library budget.
Watching all this happen part of believes there has to be a better
way. I have high hopes that perhaps the SUNY Office of Library and
Information Services has caught on. Recently, OLIS piloted a project
where a shared instance of SFX was created to be used by several SUNY
campuses. In addition, OLIS has been working on a shared DSpace server
for SUNY. Personally, I hope that this is only the beginning of
technology resource sharing but only time will tell.