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OCLC announces strategy to move library management services to Web scale
DUBLIN, Ohio, USA, 23 April 2009-OCLC is connecting the content, technology and expert capabilities of its member libraries worldwide to create the first Web-scale, cooperative library management service. Member libraries can take the first step to realizing this cooperative service model with a new, "quick start" version of the OCLC WorldCat Local service.
Interesting blog post about an ExLibris presentation at ELUNA '08 about their strategy for a URM (=unified resource management) which would be a modular replacement for their existing ILS. Sounds like an ambitious timeline. Not clear whether this is a replacement for Voyager or Aleph or both or neither.
The subcommittee is now pleased to make available the final report of this investigation, available from . The release will also be announced this week at the 2008 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia."
We hooked it up to the Internet Archive's book scanning project, so that you can read the full text of all the out-of-copyright books they've made available. And we hope to add a print-on-demand feature, so that you can get nice paper copies of these scanned books, as well as a scan-on-demand feature, so you can fund the scanning of that out-of-copyright book you've always loved.
But we can only do so much on our own. Hopefully we've done enough to make it clear that this project is for real—not simply another pie-in-the-sky idea—but we need your help to make it a reality. So we're opening up the demo we've built so far, opening up the source code, opening up the mailing lists, and hoping you'll join us in building Open Library. It sure is going to be a fun ride.
—Aaron Swartz and the Open Library team, 16 July 2007
Zebra supports large databases (more than ten gigabytes of data, tens of millions of records). It supports incremental, safe database updates on live systems. You can access data stored in Zebra using a variety of Index Data tools (eg. YAZ and PHP/YAZ) as well as commercial and freeware Z39.50 clients and toolkits.
Zebra is free software, available under the GPL license. It may be used by anyone without charge. If you wish to incorporate Zebra into a commercial software distribution, please contact us about alternative licenses.
(ILS's) and discovery systems, and to create a technical proposal for accomplishing such integration.
We hope to engage the expertise and interest of the community beyond this working group, however. Towards this end, we have set up a Wiki for the project, much of which is open to public viewing and comment"