Information Takes Over

It’s all good: Twiddly Bits
And my favorite quote from Robin’s talk was in his comment on something Pat Sommers, the CEO of SirsiDynix, said in a presentation–about the ILS– to delegates on Sunday evening. Pat was responding, if I recall correctly, to a question from the floor about why ILS vendors don’t innovate more quickly. Pat remarked that his company spends $10 million a year tweaking their systems to respond to requests from customers, and that left scant time and resources to make big changes. Robin rephrased this to describe all that activity as “building twiddly bits.”

I want the vendors to build a solid extensible standards based platform to allow me to remix data to meet MY library’s needs, not the libraries that were most vocal in influencing the adoption of a new feature. If a vendor did this, they would not need to develop the twiddly bits, they could concentrate on adding functionality to the APIs.
Sure, there is a need for a ’starter pack’ that would allow a library with nothing to get started and use a funcional ILS out of the box. And indeed the use of a well structured codebase using those self-same API’s would surely benefit the Vendor, allowing them to roll out a ‘default’ install for a new customer with less heartache.

With access to that solid supported API, a ’starter pack’ library could remix to its heart’s content, building as many twiddly bits as it likes.

I want to build the twiddly bits, along with other Superpatrons.

Technorati Tags: library, library vendor, ILS, twiddly bits, Library 2.0