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into this territory is that they no longer function effectively at the user end and, to the newer user, they just look out of date.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.

Au revoir, ILMS?

There is an argument that the age of the ILMS is passing. Of course, the integrated library management system has served us wonderfully well. We depend on it to provide the efficiencies which come through automation of acquisitions, cataloguing, serials processing, and provision of access to physical resources for our users. The MARC record has transformed the way libraries work. The ILMS integrates everything into a single process.

On the other hand, one part of the ILMS - the OPAC - now looks extremely old-fashioned when compared with the normal, everyday search experience of our users when they use Google, Yahoo or one of the many Internet search engines. Increasingly, our OPACs are falling behind. The search features which are taken for granted now - relevance ranking, "did you mean?", user annotation facilities, user-generated subject headings (tags) - are all missing. The catalogue sucks, to quote the Americans (do a Google search on those two words). But effective search is absolutely critical to our future value to our users. Swinburne's recent user survey found that over 70% of our users use Google every day.

The diminishing number of ILMS vendors does not seem to be doing much about this situation - we want efficient, integrated library systems, but we also want contemporary search capacity. We have systems which developed to control print collections of monographs and serials. Now they are out of date.

At the National Library's New Ideas Forum last week Alison Dellitt and Kent Fitch presented a short overview of how the National Library of Australia is rethinking both search (find and get) and the catalogue. Great thinking - have a look at their IT Architecture Project Report.

Au revoir, ILMS? What do you think?