(Apologies in advance if this looks like crap, I hate trying to reply in context in GroupWise)

>>> On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 10:55 AM, Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]> wrote: 
> Quoting Eric Hellman <[log in to unmask]>:
> 
> 
>> What are the reasons that this sort of integration not more  
>> widespread? Are they technical or institutional? What can be done by  
>> producers of open access content to make this work better and  
>> easier? Are "unified" approaches being touted by vendors delivering  
>> something really different?
> 
> I've been struggling with this around the Open Library digital texts:  
> how can we make them available to libraries through their catalogs?

You're aware of the recent addition of the OpenLibrary Read API, which is meant to simplify exactly this problem, right?

The official announcement was at http://blog.openlibrary.org/2011/06/03/announcing-a-new-read-api/ ; http://ur1.ca/4g5bd describes how I integrated it into Evergreen with a few hours' effort (mostly helping to debug the new service); the official documentation is at http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/read and I augment those docs in the latter half of the presentation I gave last week (available in plain text, html, and epub formats at http://bzr.coffeecode.net/2011_olita/ ).

> When I look at the install documentation for Umlaut [1](I was actually  
> hoping to find a "technical requirements" list), it's obvious that it  
> takes developer chops. We're not going to find that in a small,  
> medium, or often even a large public library. It seems to me that this  
> kind of feature will not be widely available until it is included in  
> ILS software, since that's what most libraries have.

The OpenLibrary digital editions enhancement approach I took in Evergreen was about 100 lines of JavaScript (around here: http://ur1.ca/4g5cm ), most of which could probably be cloned (under the GPL v2 or later) to any other library system from which you can scrape ISBNs or other identifiers (LCCN, OCLC, or OpenLibrary IDs).

Note that the Evergreen-OpenLibrary integration hasn't been merged yet, but the branch is there and will hopefully make its way into core Evergreen soon.