While library content and services have undergone dramatic shifts in recent decades, new library systems haven’t been acquired by academic institutions at the same speed. While we’ve seen incremental improvements to those library systems, the community must be wondering whether library systems are effectively supporting the needs of the current environment and whether they are well positioned to serve changing demands. Do they adequately serve professional and patron requirements for open access publications, acquisitions for or lending from cooperative collections, or the diverse ways in which content may be packaged and linked in the 21st century?
At the FEDLINK Spring Expo, Todd Carpenter discussed what changing demands have meant for the information community as a whole and notes the useful role played by standards in ensuring that system processes operate smoothly and seamlessly. Successful collaboration by publishers and librarians in workflow areas such as content platform migrations as well as anticipated work on rapid identification of changes made to publisher content packages ultimately improve the patron experience. All of this may be summed up in a single word — interoperability.
