Hurry up Please It’s Time – Karen Schneider Keynote

Hurry up Please It’s Time – Karen Schneider
State of Emergency

• We have given away our collections
• We don’t build or own the tools that manage them
• We provide complex, poorly-marketed systems
• We function like a monopoly service when our competition is thriving right under our nose.

Memory work – preserve and provide access to our culture’s memories

5-3-1 rule

• Pick 5 issues you believe are important
• Focus on 3
• Now make 1 happen

Five Things we can fix

• Digital preservation
• Standards adoption
• The sucky state of most library software
• Third-party library hegemony
• Scholarly awareness of key issues in LibraryLand

3

• Digital preservation
• The sucky state of most library software
• Scholarly awareness of key issues in LibraryLand

1

• The sucky state of most library software

4 Nifty Happenings with Library Software

• Evergreen
• Umlaut
• Scriblio
• The solr search engine you are all going to bolt on top of your geezy old ILS middleware as soon as you get home from code4lib

Renaissance of librarian built software

• Begins to restore the balance of power
• Reinstates the direction of our profession
• Puts emphasis back on the library as memory organization
• Sends the message that we means business

Other outcomes

• Creative decoupling of components
• Interesting re-use of tools, such as Wordpress
• Re-socialization of librarian artisans

My big 1 today: Evergreen

• Evergreen is big… really big
• Timing is perfect: an era of worrisome consolidation, even as … paradoxically…
• The centrality of the ILS is weakening

• in a better position to take risks, change software

Useful over-generalization

• Nobody cares about open source
• Nobody cares about standards
• Nobody cares about usability
• Nobody cares about Evergreen
• The ARL body count continues to drive too many decisions
• IT directors do not have the resources to take on underfunded mandates
• Most libraries cannot provide developer time

It is all about the experience they don’t care about the software

How directors see the world

• How much does it cost, and what are we getting for the money?
• What are other directors doing?
• What problems will it create?
• Why would I spend time/money on this rather than X?
• Is this thing fully baked?

Need to answer these questions ahead of time. Otherwise, you don’t have a prayer of getting resources/support.

What do directors “know” about open source

• One guy in a garage… probably in a torn tee-shirt

• One care accident away from orphan software
• No support model
• Cheesy “make-do” quality
• Arcane and developer-oriented
• Nobody else is doing it

Open source software projects have a huge problems with marketing their “products”.

There is no such thing as free software!

5 Strategies

• The riveting lead
• The elevator talk
• The pre-visit background investigation

Search Analytics for Your Site – Lou Rosenfeld