I know I said I would only be taking “a day’s break” from posting about applying the Service Oriented Architecture pattern to library services but, well, real work gets in the way. Thoughts are still bubbling around — some of them have even reached draft form — but nothing new yet. In the meantime, though, take a look at this DLF Workshop on Developing a Services Framework for Digital Libraries to be held on Tuesday, November 07, 2006 in Boston. These sound like great outcomes:
This workshop will provide an overview of the work of the group to date [Service Framework for Digital Libraries DLF progress report dated 17 May 2005 and A Library Service Framework in the July/August 2006 issue of D-Lib] and then focus on a hands-on approach to define various library/digital library activities. The workshop attendees will break into three small groups to work through the business logic for three library areas: Digitization, Storage of digital assets, and Discovery of digital assets. The output is expected to be a series of flow charts and a set of decomposed business processes and functions that will be included in the services framework. These will provide a basis for further systems analysis in the future as a SOA-based approach to library automated services is considered. Workshop attendees are expected to have experience with library IT management and/or technical development of digital library projects.
I only wish I could be there myself — I’ve already been engaged by the University of Windsor to talk about Library SOA at about the same time — and I’m looking forward hearing about to the outcomes from the workshop.
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Hey, Peter. This does, indeed, sound interesting, but one must have one’s priorities…my daughter’s birthday is on the 6th, so I’ll be otherwise entertained! I can’t, however, miss the opportunity to suggest that it may not be all it is cracked up to be. One of the limits of any DLF endeavor is that it is limited usually exclusively to DLF members, no one without the requisite club card is allowed. And, although they say, “Workshop attendees are expected to have experience with library IT management….”, therein lie the problem: a number of the DLF member representatives attending such an event do not, in fact, have experience in library IT. I do not mean this as a slight to DLF members. It is in my opinion one of the unfortunate outcomes of the way DLF is structured. Some day I’ll write more on this larger issue at Tom’s Thoughts. I hope something good comes of it from which all of us can benefit. –Tom
Ah, yes! Then you do have your priorities in the correct alignment. (My son’s birthday is today and the in-laws are coming into town tonight. I won’t get much work-work done at home over the next week or so, but it will be worth it.
I would love to hear your larger thoughts on this and related issues at some point (I’ll keep a closer eye on your blog), but I am of mixed feelings on the topic. OhioLINK will probably never be a member of DLF (I’m having a hard enough time scraping up the justification to rejoin CNI), but the work that is done does seem to be widely published, reviewed, and acted upon. (The prime example that comes to mind is the ERMI group which gave rise to the explosion of electronic resource management systems today.)
It would be one thing if they were to do this work and then kept it to themselves, but that doesn’t seem to be the track record, at least from my vantage point. I would like to be in there mixing it up with the rest of them because it is an area of interest of mine, but I can wait for the next phase of wider discussion to take place…
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DLF Services Working Group Workshop…
I attended a workshop held by the Digital Library Federation’s Services Framework Working Group, held November 7, 2006. Finally, my kinda initiative. Libraries, technology, architecture, SOA, all combined into one nifty group working together for the …
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