Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Open source
This chapter has so far not touched on resource discovery via library
management systems and next-generation catalogues in any detail, as
it is anticipated that open-source library management systems such as
Evergreen
33
and KOHA
34
and next-generation catalogue/library
resource portals such as VuFind
35
will come to dominate the market
over the next five to ten years. The implementation of open-source
systems is gathering pace in the USA, and in Europe with the
establishment of companies such as PTFS Europe;
36
and as previously
missing modules such as Serials and Inter-Library Loans are soon to be
released, these systems will soon become a reality. Some existing library
management vendors, such as TALIS, already have an eye on the future
with the Juice Project. Its aim is to make it easy to enhance library
catalogues without duplication of effort, or, as Richard Wallis puts it,
'slap some mash on your OPAC' (Wallis, 2009a, 2009b).
Mash-ups
The Mashup, where data from one or more sites is brought together to
add value to the data on another site, is only four years old.
37
The truth is, we will not know what the next Google will look like until
it comes along - it will certainly include mash-ups with a whole lot more
personalization and Web 2.0 functionality, such as blogs, personalized
accounts, alerts, plug-ins and APIs, some of which may fall by the
wayside as new features are developed (King, 2008; Nicholas et al. 2009).
We may even be in a situation where we can do it ourselves or use
free stuff, e.g. Tony Hirst's work with Yahoo Pipes,
38
where he uses Scott
Wilson's jOPML (Journals into OPML ),
39
an application built using the
data exported from the ticTOCS project
40
to:
pull a list of journals in a particular subject area, based on user-
provided keywords, into the Yahoo Pipes environment
pull the most recent table of contents from those journals into
that environment
then filter those recent articles to display only the articles on a
particular subtopic.
