Ken Chad just released his briefing paper ‘Rethinking the Library Services Platform‘ on his HELibTech wiki. It’s an excellent overview – Ken has been surveying library technology for about twenty years, and has maintained great independence both from individual vendors and from the Open Source movement.

While every vendor currently markets their latest offering as a ‘platform’ rather than an LMS or ILS, Ken defines the term ‘platform’ as a technical standard that enables interoperability of various vendors’ applications; something that goes significantly beyond the few APIs today’s systems offer. The ‘Cloud’ could facilitate such interoperability because connectivity between different vendors’ applications doesn’t have to be replicated for every single end user, and data can be shared rather than copied into customers’ set-ups.

Where I don’t quite agree with Ken is his take on OSS vs. proprietary. Ken seems to think that only big companies such as EBSCO and Proquest can fund the technological development needed for the creation of the next generation of library software, while OSS struggles ‘to catch up with hundreds of person-years of development, testing, and documentation’.  Is that really so? I’ve worked with an Open Source LMS (Koha), and was amazed how fast it developed – and how little it cost to have new features coded. And I’ve worked with a mainstream proprietary LMS (Aleph), and have been perplexed how little that has changed in nearly twenty years, and how much the vendor still charges for their ‘vintage’ product. (How much would you be prepared to pay for Windows 98 these days?).

Having said that, I do share Ken’s vision of interoperable, modular, Cloud-based library software. I just hope libraries take the lead in developing their platform Open Source. To me, Kuali OLE has been the most promising development in recent years.