Welcome to the Talis Source blog
We live in interesting times, somebody somewhere once said and it surely is. The ILL community in the UK are now starting to witness a radical change in the way that ILL services are delivered, and understandably there are many questions being asked.
Talis has played a fundamental role in the delivery of ILL service since 2001 when we stepped in to assist The Combined Regions and their membership. They wanted a service that they could rely on, with a company whose stability and security was assured. Talis certainly ticked those boxes, given its thirty year heritage in the library sector and its in-depth knowledge and understanding of data, through its cooperative cataloguing activity.
Five years on and another major change is underway. Until now, software has been proprietary and closed. ILL activity in the UK has been quite restrictive. Many libraries preferring to interlend only with those libraries that share the same system. Not, I would venture to guess, because libraries using different systems are in any way less reliable, but simply because different systems did not easily enable interoperability. How many times have those of us involved in this space, heard libraries say "all we want is to be able to search and request from another library and have that interaction recorded and tracked in our ILL system AND our circulations system. A straightforward request with lots of complexity hidden within it.
And a request that is about to be further complicated by the growing expectations of library users and non-users that they could and should be able to request any item from any library irrespective of the geography and have it delivered to their door.
So, why is a major change underway? Because the technology is changing. We've reached a point where technology is opening up systems and facilitating greater interoperability. Which is great news for those of us who want to see advances in the way that we run ILL services in the present. But its also great news for those of us who are seeing library service developments extending beyond the sphere of interlibrary loan, which is as we know, a means to an end.
In mid-March, Talis unveiled a new technology platform and with it a new approach to delivering services. Talis Source is the first such service to be offered via the Platform but other services developed by other service providers will quickly follow.
We're going to use this blog to explain more about why ILL (and other) services shortly to follow are going to be radically different. And about how the Platform is going to address complexity in resource discovery and resource sharing and beyond. And we're going to use this blog to stimulate discussion or better still a conversation. In my role as Product Marketing Manager for UnityWeb and now Talis Source, I regularly get to hear about developments from other companies and libraries and in other countries. We'll be using this blog to keep those of us with an interest in resource sharing up-to-date with developments in the UK and overseas. So, if anyone has anything they would like to suggest we discuss on the blog I would love to hear from you.
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