I met my new neighbor last week.  An open welcome here to Rob Zangara who has recently come aboard as the chief technology officer for the Seattle Public Library.  Rob Comes to the West Coast from the New Jersey State library and he brings alot of experience in networking and technology infrastructure.  A friend across Lake Washington with this kind of experience is welcome news to me as I could use some good advice and collaboration toward development of a longer-term vision for the network at KCLS.

While Rob was interested in Evergreen and open-source, it wasn't necessarily at the top of his list.  Like all of us, he faces a lava field of immediate technology priorities.  High on Rob's queue was the need for attention to functional problems with the PC Reservation system.

SPL and KCLS happen to use the same vended PC reservation system, and we apparently use it in slightly different ways.  I can't recall the specifics off-hand, but his functional need had something to do with the branch libraries having a need for more independence--to be able to change the duration of a given session for of a public workstation.  

The libraries want to be able to change the duration of a patron sessions from an hour, to two hours, to fifteen minutes if they want.  At KCLS, we have a tendency execute that kind of change centrally.  Given that we were involved in the early development of the PC reservation system in question here, it happened to get developed to fit our culture.

Now Rob needs to change it, and he's facing the same issue with the PC Reservation system that we all face with our ILS systems.  The once-dynamic PC Reservation product has been through one cash-in entrepreneurial sale to a big vendor, who soon forgot why they bought it, and subsequently dispatched it to another vendor in a software/subsidiary fire-sale.

The PC Reservation is licensed software, so to Rob it is a black box with no access.  And the current owners of the software haven't really shown a high-value or capacity for software modification based on customer-requests.

The whole discussion reminded me that our need as public libraries to get ahold of our information systems--that need stretches much more broadly than simply moving to open-source with the ILS.  We have to be constantly evolving a strategy for IT independences across all of our various systems. 

That strategy includes plans for our networks, which are always evolving in a contest for control and access to the  abundant access capacity that we need to deliver our changing services.  But that is a subject for another post.