On behalf of the ILS Discovery Interface group, I want to thank
everyone who responded to the survey our group conducted in
September about your current and desired uses of your ILS and
discovery applications. The survey, announced on this list and
a few others, received over 150 individual responses, with many
informative comments. They've informed our thinking in important ways.
We're now developing recommendations for functions and
behaviors that the ILS should support to allow useful and innovative
discovery applications to make the most of library resources. We've
identified a number of functions that would be useful to many people,
and potentially many different ways they could be implemented.
This is where we could use your help again. We've been working on draft
recommendations for different kinds of ILS functions, and have been
putting much of our work on a Wiki that folks are welcome to visit and
comment on. At the upcoming ILS DLF forum, we'll be presenting on the
progress of our work, and hosting an open discussion session. My hope
is that through these sessions, we can keep you informed, get a better
idea of community priorities, and explore some ways that folks who may
already be working in some of the areas we're looking at can help
with concrete specifications and prototype or reference
implementations.
So if you're interested in discovery building on the ILS, we hope you'll
participate. Our presentation will be at the DLF Forum in Philadelphia
on Tuesday, November 6, in the 3:15-4:45 pm session. An open discussion
session will follow from 5-6pm.
If you'd like to see our work so far, I invite you to check out our
Wiki at
https://project.library.upenn.edu/confluence/display/ilsapi/Home
For folks who might want to read something while traveling, we've
also made a static snapshot of the recommendation draft we're
working on, as a single Word file for downloading for offline perusal.
You can find it by clicking on "Draft recommendation" from the URL
above and following the instructions on that page.
Thank you, and I hope to see many of you at DLF next week!
John Mark Ockerbloom
for the DLF ILS-DI task force
