your library needs networked services and maybe coders

Since I'm not a librarian, I may not always do the best job of communicating to the library profession.  "Libraries need networked services because... it's obvious," would unfortunately tend to be my explanation.  Fortunately, Eric Lease Morgan comes to my rescue with a clear and thoughtful posting on Library services and in-house software development.

This essay outlines two opportunities for the library profession: 1) the increased need for library services and not necessarily library collections, and 2) the ability to be leaders in the implementation of services through in-house software development.

I have said "networked services" specifically to distinguish technology-based services from traditional "services to clients".  One methodology to handle the steps needed for identifying and creating services is Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).  This leads in my organization to us talking about "SOA services", in order to make things clear.  I will caution that I believe it is quite challenging to use SOA without having a pre-existing or creating a co-existing Enterprise Architecture (EA) context for it.

The above links are to my blog categories, you can also check out the Wikipedia definitions: SOA, EA.

One of the big challenges and questions in the networked services area I think is to what extent you can deliver sustainable services using very lightweight point-solution scripting approaches, and to what extent you need a larger superstructure of service architecture and design.

UPDATE: Also, I think the nature of the services you need to provide is very much linked to the nature of your library.  I can imagine a public library providing services like Book Reservation, Book Loan Status, or even e.g. providing free blog hosting for local book clubs, with built-in services to link to the library's holdings and to add reviews and tags to the library catalogue.  For an academic/research library, the services should be very much researcher-centric.  In fact, I can imagine the library providing much of the support infrastructure for the research workflow.  While this may seem like an expansion of the library's role, it's quite logical: if I break research into Discovery (of background information), Reference (to the found knowledge), and Creation (of new knowledge) then the library has a role to play at each stage.  Here are some quick thoughts:

Discovery

• provide federated search across licensed holdings
• provide tools to discover ranking, relevance
• assist in collaborating with colleagues to gather important articles (Connotea does this, as do other bookmarking services)
• data and knowledge mining related to discovered articles or items of interest (chemicals, molecules, genes etc.)

Reference

• tools for citation management, bibiographic formatting
• this may become a complex area if scientists start citing data, code and web resources
• dare I say citation verification?

Creation

• automatic creation of permanent identifiers for data and code
• assistance with creating appropriate references/links/identifiers for items of interest (chemicals, molecules, genes, etc.)
• tools to assist with paper creation, including submission into peer review, pre-print auto-archiving and post-print auto-archiving

As you can see, there is a big role in supporting knowledge discovery, as well as a role closely aligned with traditional archiving - build data, code and paper storage and management into the researcher's workspace, in order to avoid the current issues with attempting to get deposit into repositories after the fact.

ENDUPDATE

My organization has identified networked library services as a key component of our future ("target state"), and we're interested in working with / partnering with other organizations to help further explore, define and implement such services.