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Each new year brings a particular anticipation for what might be coming down the line to affect both business and personal life.
In this new century, we can anticipate tremendous changes in the way libraries serve their customers.
The way that technology has changed the profession by providing the tools to do quickly what was previously only achieved slowly and with great
effort, has been startling.
The next phase of the revolution will occur as the technology of E-commerce begins to be deployed for libraries. Until recently, information technology in libraries has been primarily concerned with managing the traditional processes of recording stock (cataloguing) and its movement (circulation). The task of searching for information and bibliographic items has largely been a separate, though vital, service function. The wide variety of sources for information of all kinds and their disparity of searching methods led to the development of the Z39.50 technology and opened up the possibilities of searching many different databases from within one product. The creation of "virtual union catalogues" encompassing many different resources - a long time dream for many librarians - has become a reality from the desktop.
The next step - now that libraries can easily search each other's resources - is to enable the interlending of material between those
resources. The technology standards are all in place with ISO 10160/61 firmly established as the e-trading standard between libraries.
Products have emerged and are now being established and the integrated library system's vendors are beginning to incorporate this new function. The whole profession and industry is starting to think about the implications of the technology. Here is my list to get your brain stirring:
If libraries can talk "peer to peer" to discover locations and then place requests - where does that leave the centralised agencies
like OCLC, BLDSC etc.?
Will their business shrink as "disintermediation" takes place as has happened in the travel industry? Or will they lead by embracing the technology, maintaining an essential pivot role?
- Will libraries begin to lose personal callers as web based "request" services lessen the need for personal callers? - much as
bookshops have been hit by booksellers.com allowing armchair browsing and ordering?
- Will system vendors find that without close integration of such technology, their systems become less attractive to libraries wanting to
provide latest document delivery services?
- How will the established regional library co-operative services, whose very existence is based on a particular model of inter-trading, adapt to
the new paradigm? Will they become the leaders and provide training for their members? Will they become re-sellers themselves for the technology amongst their members?
- And finally, will these changes and opportunities throw up new industry leaders to rival those companies who have long dominated?
It is happening in most other IT based industries - consider AOL.
A brief report on the ILL products at the first ALA of the century is in this issue - and coming soon an in-depth technical briefing on ISO 10160/61.
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