Come to the Fiesta!Join the OLE Project

Tim McGearyDoreen Herold

Lehigh University

Come to the Fiesta! Join the OLE Project

• Brief review of the ILS environment• What is the OLE Project?• What is the status of the Project?• How can I join?

Brief review of the ILS environment

• ILS does not fit modern scholarly process• Workflows adapted to manage collections are based on outdated assumptions• Dissatisfaction among libraries with proprietary ILS• Our collections are changing more rapidly than our systems

DataMass digitization

• Early efforts in the OS model have a different primary constituency

Brief review of the ILS environment

By Marshall Breeding, Library Technology Guides http://www.librarytechnology.org/ Used with permission

What is the OLE Project?With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Open Library Environment (OLE) Project will convene the academic library community in the design of an

Open Library Management System built on Service Oriented Architecture.

The project leaders are a multi-national group of libraries dedicated to thinking beyond the current model of an Integrated Library System and to designing a new system that is flexible, customizable and able to meet the changing and complex needs of modern, dynamic academic libraries. The end product will be a design document to inform open source library system development efforts, to guide future library system implementations, and to influence current Integrated Library System vendor products.

from http://oleproject.org/

There already is an open source library system…

• Koha• Evergreen• NewGenLib• MicroLCS• Emilda• GNUTeca• OpenBiblio• PhpMyLibrary• PMB• And more…

•Current open source projects do address aspects of the ILS limitations•Great place to start•We think there is more work to be done in rethinking completely the library management systems needed by academic libraries•We expect the projects now in progress will inform our work•When a software development project follows, we hope the best pieces can be used (SOA)

Current Work

External ProjectConnections

Business Process Modeling

External Project Connections

The OLE Project is based on notions of community-source development and

SOA design principles. These principles convey support for open systems that

exchange data using open standards and support many-2-many interoperability

with related enterprise systems.

External Project ConnectionsWe wish to identify other projects/applications for which we plan to make specific community connections and/or to differentiate the OLE Project from other projects.

While many of the projects/applications listed next are of interest to the OLE Project, this is not an exhaustive list of related projects/applications; these applications and projects are listed as examples.

External Project Connections

End-User Discovery Interfaces that ideally interoperate via DLF ILS Discovery Interfaces principles. (not all of these may yet have a plan for interoperability with the DLF DI APIs)

o BlackLight o eXtensible Catalog (XC) o Endeca o VuFind o Omeka

Kuali Foundation o Kuali Financial o Kuali Student o Kuali Coeus (aka Kuali

Research Administration) o Other Kuali apps

Leaning Management Systems

o Moodle o SAKAI

External Project Connections

Open Source ILS Projects o Evergreen o Koha o NewGenLib

Repositorieso D-Spaceo EPrints -- to engage folks in

Europeo Fedora Project

SOA Principles & Governanceo e-Framework o Galaxy

Other Higher Education and/or Cultural Institution Interfaces o Collection Space o OpenCast o Project Bamboo o SEASR

External Project Connections

Web Scholarly Research Tools o Zotero o Visual Understanding Environment (VUE)

Enterprise SOA Middleware Projects

oKuali Rice oFluid oJBOSS oMule oShibboleth oGrouper oRules Engines

Business Process Modeling•Training in November 2008•Talking with other open source projects about how they’ve proceeded with BPM

Business Process ModelingProject Bamboo

Bamboo is an multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort to bring together researchers in arts and humanities, computer and information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to collectively tackle the question: How can we enhance arts and humanities

research through the development of shared technology services? From their project proposal: http://projectbamboo.uchicago.edu/files/docs/bamboo_proposal.pdf

oParticipants didn't want to create an 'us' and 'them' situation, so Bamboo included all participants in all parts of the workshops. Participants emphasized that the project needed to have all members at the table and all must be encouraged to say how the work they do relates to arts and humanities. Various participants came to understand that there's a whole set of terms that they didn't realize related to each other and that they all had a vested interest in the space.oParticipants were asked to group the things they had discussed into common practices and

uncommon practices. The goal was to find out what everyone has in common, what things are uncommon, and what are the differences between these things. What things does everyone know about and what things should be on the big roadmap?

Business Process ModelingCollectionSpace

CollectionSpace is a collaborative effort to bring multiple institutions together with the common goal of providing a platform for a collections management

system that a) delivers the core collections management functions needed by a variety of institutions, b) is an enabler for the emerging and dynamic set of new technology challenges and opportunities facing the cultural heritage community, and c) is an effective and affordable alternative to vendor offerings…the partners will deliver a collections management system and collection information system platform that can be used by institutions of all sizes and collection types. The architecture of the system will be flexible, agile, and service-enabling. From their wiki: http://wiki.collectionspace.org/

oThey recommend that as we talk about BPM, we need to discuss not what the steps are that we would follow in a system, but what are the abstract tasks we need to follow.

Business Process ModelingCollectionSpace (continued)

oAs people began to talk about what they did, they discussed how the processes intersected. This was sometimes surprising to participants as they didn't realize that some of their processes intersected until they began talking about them in an abstract way.oThey also not only asked how people were doing particular tasks, but also how they

would like to do these tasks.oTheir approach was to start with a very shallow and broad look at the total space of

what a system might need to do.oThey tried to balance between the known world and allowing room and freedom for

people to say 'why couldn't we do something like this'. As they were going through more mundane things, people got excited and more visionary ideas emerged.oTheir focus was on the user, not on what are the steps you need to do in the system.

What do you want to do? How should this work?oThey've done some work on roles of people who might interact with the system. What

does a registrar need to do with this system? They suggested we begin thinking about roles.

Business Process ModelingKuali Financial Systems

The Kuali Financial System (KFS) project is working to create acomprehensive suite of financial software that meets the needs of all Carnegie Class institutions. Its partner institutions are colleges,

universities, and interested organizations that share a common vision of open, modular, and distributed systems for their software requirements. The goal of KFS is to bring the proven functionality of legacy applications to the ease and universality of online services.From their website: http://www.kuali.org/communities/kfs/

oLooking at our processes in the abstract shows that we have similar concepts, that what we do is not that different from each other. oOur differences shouldn’t be minimized but acknowledged. Yet, despite the

differences in what we do, fundamentally, we have similar processes.oConsider how we might process purchase orders differently—we shouldn’t be

shoehorned into the same workflow. A new system should accommodate any nuance.

What is the status of the Project?

Scope document draft – September 2008

Webcast – October 2008

Business process modeling training – November 2008

Webcast – November 20, 2008

Regional design workshops – November 2008 to January 2009

SOA training – January 2009

How can I join?•Subscribe via RSS or email to be notified when new materials or new events are announced.

•Provide feedback on the pages and documents in this website by Posting a Comment at the end of pages.

•Discuss project ideas with others through the project’s open listserv ole@duke.edu. To subscribe, send a message to sympa@duke.edu with either the subject or body: SUBSCRIBE OLE.

•Attend a presentation about the project. Upcoming events are posted on the website calendar. Presentation materials from events are available in the Documents section of the Post Categories.

•Look for invitations to participate in project meetings and webcasts via announcements on both the website and listserv.

How can I join?Attend a regional design workshop

•Pittsburgh, PA (University of Pittsburgh)

•NJ/NY metropolitan area

•Durham, NC (Duke University)

•Chicago, IL

•Lawrence, KS (University of Kansas)

- OTHER POSSIBLE SITES -Harrisburg, PA - Philadelphia, PA - Baltimore, MDAnd others around the county, Canada & Australia

Thank you!

Questions and conversation