Taking a Day's Break from SOA

No Service Oriented Architecture posting today, but here is a glimpse of the topic of the next one -- the title is: "Web Services: A means to a Service Oriented Architecture end." In the meantime I wanted to thank everyone for their public and private comments, and to ask to keep 'em coming. The big push for writing about SOA this week was a lead up to a meeting of the OhioLINK Technical Advisory Council (TAC) today. On TAC's agenda was a question about looking at SOA as a design strategy for new and migrated services. These blog postings served several purposes: 1) propel the topic a little further in the library community [presupposing that it was a worthy topic]; 2) serve as background information for today's meeting; 3) flush out comments from the library community [which it did -- thanks again!]; and 4) form the basis of a whitepaper on SOA at OhioLINK. TAC agreed to keep looking at it and endorsed the writing of the whitepaper. Keep the comments and observations coming!

On a somewhat related note, I wanted to tie up a loose end from this summer:

In academic libraries, in my experience, there has been a decline in the use of library catalogs. This experience could be verified in the ARL supplementary statistics for at least that population of libraries (I think those numbers are password-protected, so it might be a challenge to try to use them). When I get back on the ground and have some time, I will either offer confirmation of that supposition or retract it.

DLTJ "Is the Writing On The Wall?" -- Take 2, Wednesday, June 14th, 2006

I retract the statement. Although it has been true in my direct experience, I cannot find any statistics — for either academic libraries or the broader community — to back up that experience. Thanks, Walt, for calling me on it and keeping me on the straight-and-narrow.