[OPEN-ILS-DEV] acq timeline

[David J. Fiander]

Independent of everything that Evergreen is doing, this project could 
easily be a wonderful addition to the library literature.  One of the 
problems that I ran into when searching for lit. related to acq was an 
almost complete absence of any concrete descriptions of how things are done 
in real libraries.

Actually, this is a problem that I have with the history of librarianship 
in general.  There seems to be no practical, on the ground, descriptions of 
how circ, acq, or serials are (or were) handled in real libraries.  CS has 
a fairly rich literature of the history of systems, but librarianship seems 
not to.

For example, when I was a kid (that is, when I was 10, mid-1970s), the 
local library used a checkout system that seemed to involve photographing 
my card and the circ. cards for the books I was checking out, using a 
specialized system embedded in the circ desk (can you tell I was fated to 
be a librarian and that CS was just distraction?). While this is clearly 
going to save the time of the reader during the checkout process, the 
records management issues surrounding managing the images, checking items 
in (which is less time-sensitive), and handling overdue items would 
probably have been a bear.

</derail>

- David, delurking, to avoid the "back to school" workload

Ed Summers wrote:
> On 9/4/07, Dan Scott <denials at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Yes, lightweight, agile, blah blah... but if you're staring at code
>> without knowing what people want from the system, it seems that it
>> could be pretty frustrating. If you don't think that the problem
>> scenarios will be helpful in understanding the problem domain, it's
>> easy for me _not_ to write them :)
> 
> They are actually extremely helpful in understanding the problem domain, dbs++
> 
> If we had a similar story for other stakeholders (BC, etc?) I think
> we'd be well situated to create a use case for ordering monographs in
> Woodchip.
> 
> //Ed


-- 
David J. Fiander
Digital Services Librarian