Miskatonic University PressI think my numbering scheme for Access talks doesn't match anyone else's. Hard cheese, I'm afraid. This was a twofer, first with Roy Tennant in OCLC vendor mode and then Mike Rylander in Equinox Software (of Evergreen fame) vendor mode. Peter Zimmerman blogged both talks.
They both described the same kind of thing, a distributed ILS out on the Internet and not running locally, but Rylander's vision was people building it all themselves and owning it all themselves. This vibed much better with me than the OCLC idea, though the latter is certainly more likely and will be really interesting to see.
Roy Tennant, ILS In the Sky with Diamonds
Putting the ILS in the sky means "moving library data and applications to the network level at web scale." Moving to network level: going to the cloud. Explained cloud computing. Advantages and disadvantages. Amazon.
OLE Project. oleproject.org. Showed workflow diagrams, the point at which their Mellon funding ended and they don't have more funding. What next? Unknown. [This was clarified in IRC by someone involved with the project who said the first round of funding ended; the second is to come.]
eXtensible Catalog, out of Rochester.
Libraries are held back by: too many systems to support, too much invested in maintenance, a fragmented web presence, lost opportunities for leveraging data.
Putting an ILS on the network: boring. What can they do to use the infrastructure they have?
1,212,383 libraries worldwide. Transactions: 166,041,975,140 per year. 5,265/per second
They say they could do that with a handful of commodity servers. How?
There's data, public and private. Users. Libraries. Services.
Next-gen ILS: Do all library functions. Scalable. 100% web-based.
He stressed how much cheaper this will be. Selling the product. Shows timelines for what they're doing. Targetting a rollout in 2011 for this new thing.
Mike Rylander, Open Source ILS
Open source matters. Open data matters.
People threaten their vendors by saying they'll move to Evergreen. He's cool with that.
Cloud computing: "The use of any computing resource that is not mine, AND that I don't have to manage." "Learning not to waste computing resource."
Evergreen. SOA, SaaS-ish. Paas-ish.
Could they scale Evergreen up to run a community-owned, community-run community-maintained Platform-as-a-Service cloud?