State of the art ILMS - oxymoron?

My library has an end-of-life integrated library management system (ILMS), Dynix Classic. Every library has an ILMS. An ILMS is a good thing - functional integration, management of resources, efficient workflows, adherence to standards, and so on. But the feature of them all that strikes the librarian venturing into this territory is that they no longer function effectively at the user end and, to the newer user, they just look out of date. They have failed to incorporate features which are commonplace in daily Web use. The development cycle for a conventional ILMS is too long to keep up to date with fast-moving areas of change, such as those loosely described by the term Web 2.0.

Lorcan Dempsey has a recent brief post - and many previous - on the ILMS and he refers to the enquiry into the state of the ILMS recently commissioned in the UK by JISC and SCONUL - a focus on the higher education sector, but relevant to anyone. A new discussion paper on the ILMS from the University of Windsor (Ontario) defines them as "proprietary monolithic systems encompassing the major operations of the library." Windsor, like many others, is not only evaluating its ILMS, but questioning the concept. Since then, Windsor has announced that it is partnering with Georgia Public Library Service in developing acquisitions software for the NZ open source software, Evergreen; there is a nice presentation about this. Also in Canada, the British Columbia public library system is running with BC Pines, a project for "The phased implementation of the Evergreen Open ILS for all of BC . . . over the next 5 years."

There is clearly a lot going on in the ILMS zone, and there seems to be much more willingness to contemplate open source solutions, and other new approaches too. For all of us, the dilemma is that we wish to retain the back end efficiencies and workflows of the conventional, slowly evolving ILMS, but we would also like to achieve the functionality and agility that open source can provide at the user access end.

Another factor: at Swinburne loans of books account for 15-20% of our total managed "transactions" (loans, uses, full text downloads, repository use, online reserve). The ILMS is primarily a tool for managing physical items and material we pay for. As book use declines as a proportion of total use, developers and vendors of the traditional ILMS must surely sense a new business model coming?
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At Swinburne we are taking stock, and we are particularly interested in academic libraries which are doing the same kind of thing.

Life after Fenwick

I went to the launch of Life after Fenwick, by Valerie Johnson. This is a book about library services for children, published by Auslib Press, and for those of you who don't know, the Fenwick Report was published in 1966, the work of Professor Sara Fenwick.

Whenever we are swept away by the wonders of information services in the current decade, the children+books combo pushes us back in the other direction. As a Gemini, I'm entitled to be multi-focussed and confused about direction, but I wonder sometimes how other people working in libraries cope with the disjunctions in library services today. And in particular, the need to be leaders in technology, while still retaining the best of what we have always done, like children's books and children's reading.

Valerie Johnson is also concerned about training, and I guess there is a lot to be concerned about in training children's librarians. Yet is is obviously still a core role for libraries - who could buy enough books to satisfy a voracious child reader? I know very little about this area - any comments from anyone who does?