..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 …