New Justified Diatribe Against the ILS
These are getting increasingly common, thankfully, but Lori Ayre just posted a well-stated vitriolog (new word?) against modern (that’s a joke) Integrated Library Systems. While surely the ILS isn’t entirely to blame for libraries being decidedly aft of the vanguard of information technology these days, they sure didn’t fucking help much, either. In fact, being a GIS librarian I have the dear, dear luxury of being able to distance myself from library catalogs at least a little (although even I have to have those conversations with people — commoners, no less — who have noticed that most libraries aren’t exactly tearing up the information landscape with awesome new shit).
One quick thing, though: if we do indeed tackle this en masse, let’s not fuck it up by trying to be all 2.0 like the kids. We need to go from .6 to 3.0. Let’s hop that glassy interface and do some semantic shenanigans, eh?