The final 2012 issue of Information Standards Quarterly on the Future of Library Systems, and featuring articles on the new Library Services Platforms, is now available in open access on the NISO website. The earlier term integrated library systems (ILS) is associated with the functionality and concepts for managing print collections and the metadata about them. These new products and projects cast a wider net, consistent with the expansion of library collections to include a complex assemblage of electronic and digital materials in addition to their physical inventories.
Guest Content Editor Marshall Breeding has assembled a collection of articles that present a range of products and projects from this new realm of library services platform. Carl Grant provides an overview of this new genre and gives an introduction to each of the major products in this category.
A series of articles follows this introduction with discussions of real-world implementations of several of these systems. Paul Bracke relates the experience of Purdue University Libraries as a development partner with Ex Libris for Alma and how the system fits within that institution's strategic transformation already underway. Gentry Holbert presents the experience of Spring Hill College as one of the early adopters of OCLC's WorldShare Management Services. William Eric Atkinson describes how the Orange County Library System migrated from Innovative Interfaces' Millennium ILS to that company's Sierra services platform, taking advantage of its APIs to enable integration with a variety of local applications. Michael Winkler and Robert H. McDonald provide an overview and update of the Kuali OLE project that is building a next-generation, enterprise-oriented library system as open source software.
Ted Koppel of Auto-Graphics contributes an article on the Cost of Resource Exchange (CORE) project that started as a standard and ended as a recommended practice, due to a lack of uptake during the draft for trial use stage.
The NISO Reports column by Nettie Lagace discusses the publication of the NCIP standard revision and a new COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile, as well as the Mellon grant that NISO received to understand the requirements for a new bibliographic framework.
As always, the issue concludes with the Noteworthy column on recent standards-related developments of interest to the community and a summary table on the status of NISO's in-development projects.
ISQ is available electronically in open access on the NISO website. Both the entire issue and individual articles may be freely downloaded. Print copies are available by subscription and as print on demand. For more information and to access the free electronic version, visit: www.niso.org/publications/isq/2012/v24no4/.