The Council on Library and Information Resources commissioned this report to address various issues in institutional digital library initiatives vis‐à‐vis the solutions offered by systems vendors. In this report Leigh Healy analyses librarians’ views of the changing patterns of libraries and highlights the measures taken by vendors to meet these challenges.
- 1.
This document contains:
- 1
a brief report of an survey conducted in September‐October 1997 with 30 people from 17 academic, research and public libraries;
- 2
a brief report on four digital library initiatives as case studies; and
- 3
information on 12 vendors, obtained through a survey, and detailed features of their library management systems.
The library interviews focus on what libraries need from library systems vendors. The approach is qualitative, and the information provided in the chapter on library perspectives is rather anecdotal and descriptive. Although this chapter provides valuable information, it could be presented more objectively, to help the reader obtain a quick view of the current situation and trends.
The chapter on analysis of vendor profiles is based on an in‐depth interview with the president and other senior executives of 12 vendors of library management systems based in the USA. The interview was supplemented with information supplied by the vendors and Web pages. The information provided on the vendor profiles is again quite descriptive. The content of this chapter is quite valuable and help one develop a clear idea of the issues and trends in the library management software market. However, this report is not meant to be a comparative study of integrated library systems, nor does it analyse all of the features of the chosen systems.
Information on four digital library initiatives, presented as case studies, presents some important digital library issues and the corresponding measures taken by the libraries. However, the report does not mention the justification for selecting these four libraries for this study. Nevertheless, the discussions provide a snapshot of how libraries are moving towards the digital environment and which library systems they are implementing. Because this report focuses on “the needs of libraries”, and is “meant to help librarians determine to what extent the integrated library systems vendors deliver products to meet those needs”, the detailed features of the 12 library management software given in the chapter on vendor profiles, accounting for two thirds of the report, is quite useful.
This report offers a good starting point for libraries moving into the digital era. Every librarian should read it.
