If YPOW, like MPOW, is an Endeavor Voyager site, you’ve got some decisions ahead.\u00a0 Francisco Partners, naturally, would like you to migrate to Aleph, and I have no doubt that Ex Libris is, as I write this, busily working on a means to make that easy for Voyager libraries to do.\u00a0 But ILS migrations are painful, no matter how easy the backend process might be.\u00a0 There’s staff training,\u00a0 user training, managing new workflows, site integration; lots of things to deal with.\u00a0 Also, your functionality may not be a 1:1 relationship to what you currently have.\u00a0 How do you work around services you depended upon?<\/p>\n
Since soon our contracts with Endeavor Information Systems will be next to worthless, I propose, Voyager customers, that we take ownership of our systems.\u00a0 For the price of a full Oracle (or SQL Server? — does Voyager support other RDBMSes?) license\u00a0 (many of us already have this), we can get write permissions to our DB and make our own interfaces.\u00a0 We wouldn’t need to worry about staff clients (for now), since we already have cataloging, circulation, acquisitions, etc. modules that work.\u00a0 When we’re ready for different functionality, however, we can create a new middleware (in fact, I’m planning to break ground on this in the next two weeks) to allow for web clients or, even better, piggyback on Evergreen’s staff clients and let somebody else do the hard work.\u00a0 If we had native clients in the new middleware, a library could use any database backend they wanted (just migrate the data from Oracle into something else).\u00a0 The key is write access to the database.\n<\/p>\n
By taking ownership of our ILS, we can push developments we want, such as NCIP, a ‘Next Gen OPAC’, better link resolver integration, better metasearch integration, etc. without the pain of starting all over again (with potentially the same results, who is to say that whatever you choose as an ILS wouldn’t eventally get bought and killed off, as well?).\u00a0 Putting my money (or lack thereof) where my mouth is, I plan on migrating Fancy Pants<\/a> to use such a backend (read only db access, for now, we still have a support contract, after all).\u00a0 I’m calling this project ‘Bon Voyage’.\u00a0 After reading Birkin’s post on CODE4LIB<\/a>, I would like to make a similar service for Voyager that would basically take the place of the Z39.50 server and access to the database.\u00a0 Fancy Pants wouldn’t be integrated into Bon Voyage, it would just be another client (since it was always only meant as a stopgap, anyway).\n<\/p>\n What we’ll have is a framework for getting at the database backend (it’d be safe to say this will be a rails project) with APIs to access bib, item, patron, etc. information.\u00a0 Once the models are created, it will be relatively simple to transition to ‘write’ access when that becomes necessary.\u00a0 Making a replacement for WebVoyage would be fairly trivial once the architecture is in place.\u00a0 Web based staff clients would also be fairly simple.\u00a0 I think EG staff client integration wouldn’t be too hard since it would just be an issue of outputting our data to something the EG clients want (JSON, I believe) and translating the client’s reponse.\u00a0 That would need to be investigated more, however (I’m on paternity leave and not doing things like that right now \ud83d\ude42\n<\/p>\n Would anybody find this useful?\u00a0 If YPOW, like MPOW, is an Endeavor Voyager site, you’ve got some decisions ahead.\u00a0 Francisco Partners, naturally, would like you to migrate to Aleph, and I have no doubt that Ex Libris is, as I write this, busily working on a means to make that easy for Voyager libraries to do.\u00a0 But ILS migrations are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-libraries","category-philosophizing","category-polishing-the-turd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIt seems the money we spend on an ILS could be better spent elsewhere.\u00a0 I don’t think this would be a product we could distribute outside of the the current Voyager customer base (at least, not until it was completely native… maybe not even then- we’d have to work this out with Francisco Partners, I guess), but I think that that is big enough to be sustainable on its own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"