…and then my head exploded ….
Apr 9th, 2008 Print this
..well my mind got a little bit twisted anyhow…
Unnamed LMS Vendor was showing us their product at work today. The end of the demo was a booking system that added library hosted events to the catalogue.
I thought “Why would our students want to come to a catalogue to find events? Shouldn’t we start our contact with them on their own library profile, instead of inside our stock management system? What if we made their profile the centre … and then the catalogue just one jumping off point among a whole lot of library elements?”
Elements like the journal articles they saved via our federated search, their saved catalogue alerts, material they needed for their study via our course management system, a history of their tagging and reviewing and ranking … and maybe an “ask a librarian” chat window…?
Then I thought…”Well, what about the other profile starting points at our uni? We have a student portal and our Learning Management System. Why would they WANT another profile?”
“…. and what about their profiles OUTSIDE of the uni, would they rather use one of them as a starting point to access our holdings ? “
And - at the point of concluding that we either need to embed ourselves into the cosmos of all their identities, or somehow import this cosmos into our library system- my brain just gave out in a panic of illogic …
Besides the identity thing, why should a LMS have an Event system in the first place? Whatever happened to software doing one thing well, instead of lots of things badly?
An LMS should be, as you say, a branch of a students experience, no the centre…
*Myles*. The problem is that librarians still don’t have expertise at co-ordinating and organising multiple online systems and tools into a unified user experience - and we don’t have the funds to employ developers/designers to do it for us.
A *big* reason why we don’t have funds for developers is that we pay vendors huge amounts to provide data silos that have no decent, flexible, freely available API so we can get our data out. These data storage / stock management people also provide user interfaces…so they try to sell us something that does what we can’t afford to develop for ourselves.
I was going to end my post with “maybe we should just get back to getting our vendors to provide simple data interrogation systems” ..but that conclusion - being 180 degrees from what I usually think…. did my head in too.
There are some great Open Source LMS out there that are being installed by some large library systems, eg. Koha and Evergreen.
Even if we could afford it, I’m not sure what libraries have to entice developers to specialise in bringing together all those threads we need to really serve our users online.
At MPOW the students really hammer the LMS (learning management system) - they have to visit it. I reckon that’s a good place to start embedding the library experience.
We have a library tab where we can add search boxes for catalogue, federated search, meebo chat box, useful links, feed from the blog and anything else we can widgetize.
Next step would be to build a bridge between the library system and Blackboard so that student logs in and on their first page they can get a list of their current loans, or maybe just loans due in the next 7 days, list of holds and their status, relevant library events. When they visit a subject site they can get a list of course readings with links out to the e-reserve system for digital copies or to the library catalogue for hard-copies in the reserve collection.
A vision — the challenge is in making it happen. For many libraries getting the technical skills on board and resourcing for these projects can be challenging. There is so much competition for project resourcing - I guess on the bright side it means that we are working with lots of colleagues who all have great ideas to improve the student experience.