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The first day of the NISO forum on Library Resource Management Systems went very well and touched on some of the different means that libraries are now using to manage their resources to respond to the changes in the library environment.

After a great continental breakfast where I started networking with Grace Liu, Systems Librarian from the Leddy Library at the University of Windsor, Canada, the day began with a great welcome introduction from Todd Carpenter, Managing Director of NISO. During his introduction, Todd quickly pointed out that it is important to know that every organization is different from others and this should be taken into consideration while planning any implementation whether open source or commercial. He did not forget to thank Ex Libris and EBSCO for sponsoring the event.

The Keynote Presentation titled Toward Service-Oriented Librarianship was given by Oren Beit-Arie, Chief Strategy Officer at Ex Libris. He pointed out that collaboration between libraries is the way to go as it can generate savings that libraries can use toward other important means that have been neglected. Continuing, he noted that based on some Ex Libris interviews, libraries want to:

• Meet users needs by providing a single interface for discovery and delivery of library and institutional data

• Do more with less by consolidating workflows, traditional with “digital library”
• Support collaboration to increase productivity
• Build future services with SOA-based interoperability and network-based deployment options
• Incorporate user provided data etc.

Oren also mentioned some framework changes for physical content management systems like Aleph Millennium, Voyager, and Unicorn; electronic content management systems like SFX, Verde, III-ERM, and Metalib; digital content management systems like Digitool, contentDM, Fedora, and DSpace. In addition, he noted that libraries will significantly benefit from integrated systems in a much more modern way using new frameworks like Usenet Resource Downloader (URD) that allow for local, remote, and deep search, URD as decoupled front-end as single entry point for discovery and delivery of all material types including Unified Resource Management (URM) systems for selection, patron management, access rights etc.

The most exciting part of the day was when it sort of like became a dialog between Andrew Nagy and I when I asked him some questions after his informative presentation on VuFind. A couple of my questions were as follows:

1. Most of our students like VuFind but our staff and faculty, not so much. What improvement do you think can be done to improve VuFind to satisfy both students and faculty and staff?
2. We implemented VuFind on a server that has 1 gigabit of memory allocated to VuFind. However, lately, as the number of VuFind users increases (I believe), VuFind has been causing the server to crash. What solution would you suggest in resolving this situation and how much memory should be allocated to VuFind?

He responded by saying that there isn’t anything that can done to satisfy faculty and staff as VuFind has been developed to be a more modern tool for better resource discovery including social features that student may be more used to. Consequently, it is understandable when users who are not very open to experimenting with new technologies express dissatisfactions toward VuFind. He also mentioned that my boss (meaning Erik Mitchell) contacted him about the VuFind server crashing issue and according to him this issue was due to a bad server configuration. He also said that the issue is now resolved.

I still have a lot more information to share but it will be tomorrow as today was a busy day.