Good points.

"If I wanted a drop-in in one-size solution for resource discovery, from
a "corporate" supplier, for instance, I'd have to say that WorldCat
local looks pretty darn interesting. But the kind of locally-iterable,
modular, extensible toolkit that I think positions libraries well for
experimentation and innovation."

There's another important reason this "kind of locally-iterable modular
extensible toolkit" is absolutely vital, in addition to "positioning
libraries well for experimentation and innovation." It's because we
absolutely need to functionally integrate our various _different_
products from differnet vendors. Even if you go with WorldCat Local, you
still have many products from other vendors that you'd really like it to
integrate with (both on the end-user-interface, and on the backend staff
metadata control and other interfaces).  The path to accomplishing this
is with that kind of "modular extensible toolkit"---dropping in an
ostensible "one-size solution" often only creates more problems with
lack of integration.

We want "loosely coupled", but we're currently often stuck with "not
coupled at all", which causes no end of problems.

Jonathan


Joe Lucia wrote: