Looking back (at over 300 posts)

Hello everyone

I’m David Kay and I’m working with Helen Harrop, supporting JISC in the synthesis of the jiscLMS family of projects – and therefore, echoing Helen’s first post (and JFK), I guess I should say ‘Ich bin ein Synthesiser’.

As well as working with David Flanders and Ben Showers to plan the Glasgow event, I’ve just been looking back at over 300 posts for a dozen projects involving 15 institutions in the user interface and web areas (Strands 1 & 2) … so what are my impressions? I’ll go for a neat number, so here are five …

1) There is significant convergence (therefore potential synergies) across the UX and web strands, catalysed by the user requirements that are on everyone’s minds – predominantly making both the local collection and the wider mass of e-resources more coherently visible to users, especially undergraduates

2) There is encouraging enthusiasm amongst your teams and your trial users for the tools and applications that are central to this effort – we clearly have some good platforms on which to develop services and to share lessons learned

3) Both developing and exploiting open source is proving a worthwhile journey – though not everything is perfect out there in terms of documentation, support and the extra nuts and bolts needed for integration (no one expected that ;)

4) There are some very powerful vendor components that we’d be foolish to ignore – such as Aquabrowser and Worldcat – though I wouldn’t call them ‘solutions’ because they are part of a rich picture for the libraries deploying them

5) We should be sharing findings and issues and Glasgow next week not only within the programme strands (UX, Web, ERM, OS) but also – and perhaps most important – on crosscutting themes such as the underlying LMS (e.g. Millennium, Talis, Voyager), community-based support strategies (e.g. for Vufind) and user-focused ‘testing’ approaches

But ‘looking forward to Glasgow’ is my next post so enough for now …

David