Infor Library and Information Solutions

An interview with Paul Clemens, Development Manager, and Eric Conderaerts, Director of Product Management

"The user experience, which incorporates search but extends into new realms, will be very important as libraries look for additional ways to connect with users."

Director of Product Management Eric Conderaerts (left) and Development Manager Paul Clemens (right) speak with Tamir Borensztajn about the organization's development strategy and future plans.

In the last couple of years, Infor has released a variety of new products - a federated search application, a statistical analysis portal, and now a web-based integrated library system. How do these new offerings address evolving market requirements and emerging trends in our industry?

Clemens: Our development strategy has largely focused on creating a complete suite of products that address the various information management requirements in various types of libraries. As you mentioned, our products include an integrated library system, but also federated search, OpenURL, statistical analysis and e-resources management. We of course recognize that on their own these applications do not necessarily address all requirements of the modern library; there are quite a few requirements that are addressed by third-party applications and systems. Ensuring interoperability with these systems through an adherence to standards is therefore important in this context. But even more important is the overarching architectural framework. Through support for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) we have ensured - and will keep ensuring - our ability to interface with external systems and our continued compliance with existing and emerging standards in the industry.

Can you give examples of this?

Clemens: Oh, there are quite a few. In France, Vubis Smart interfaces with NEDAP's RFID tags to provide additional functionality for circulation and inventory management. Another example is the integration with the XML-gateway of Cendris in the Netherlands to provide more accurate patron addresses. You can also think of the support for web services in V-sources, our electronic resources management system, for bibliographic data updates. Also our own SSO web service, web services in our V-spaces federated search application, etc. etc.

Are web services as simple to implement as you seem to suggest?

Clemens: Well, yes and no. Each web service that is provided by other suppliers or solutions will have to be looked at individually. Take for example V-sources, our new ERM system, which we developed as a stand-alone product. When we started the development, we decided that V-sources should be able to work with "any" library system. The natural way to implement this was through web services.

Conderaerts: But web services always require two parties. Essentially web services allow us to set up request / response pairs between separate systems. Because V-sources supports web services, and because it has other import facilities, it can also be linked to library systems from other vendors, provided the other vendors implement our web services.

Clemens: Web services are the glue between applications, that's how you should look at it. But if two applications both conform to a web service specification, then it is a rather straightforward and generally accepted technology.

Now that you have mentioned V-sources so explicitly, why is this product important for libraries?

Conderaerts: This product is particularly important due to the significant increase in the number of electronic resources mainly in the last 10 or so years. It's important of course for academic libraries, and will become increasingly important for public libraries at a later stage. With the increase in electronic resources, managing the resources - from selection, acquisition, licensing, and user access perspectives - has also become more complex. Because of the major role that our university development partners play in the development of V-sources, the product has a ‘real life' test bed to ensure that all these aspects are properly addressed as well.

If we can turn our attention to the integrated library system specifically - in November you announced the general availability of V-smart, a new web-based integrated library system. Vubis Smart, Infor's client/server ILS, was introduced in 2002 and has been adopted by over 360 libraries to date. Given this success, what was the rationale for developing V-smart?

Conderaerts: V-smart first and foremost addresses the requirements of a modern library, which needs a staff application that is browser-based. As Vubis Smart is based on client/server architecture, the logical next step was to provide an ILS that is browser based. Yet, as you point out, Vubis Smart has been very successful in large part due to its strong functionality throughout all modules. V-smart continues this success story by matching the functionality of Vubis Smart - but in a web environment. Having said this, V-smart does offer advantages beyond the ability to merely work in a browser and to benefit from inherent features, such as the option to completely customize the interface. An important aspect of V-smart is a reduction in overall ownership cost to the library. As no client software needs to be installed, less maintenance is required on client workstations.

When you say that V-smart matches the functionality of Vubis Smart, what then are the main differentiators?

Conderaerts: Functionality is indeed essentially identical, and we will try to maintain that as much as possible over the coming period. As I mentioned, the back-end application sever is largely the same as that of Vubis Smart. However, the main differentiators are easier deployment and maintenance, a better and customizable staff interface, and better more "open" access to system data. The ease of deployment is a factor which should not be under-estimated. We get more and more requests from libraries that want to hook up schools, social institutions, and other types of organizations to their services, - providing "mini-libraries" in their community. With V-smart, this will become a lot easier. One only needs a browser to run the system. So setting up ASP type solutions will be a lot easier, - resulting in lower total costs of ownership and allowing the library to reaffirm its position as the main information provider in the community.

Can you elaborate a bit more on the concept of better access and openness?

Clemens: With better access to the system data we mean the ability to view and extract core data - such as access to borrower or item data. Access to data is accomplished through web services, on top of ODBC/SQL access. Through enhanced access we provide libraries the means to use system data for additional purposes, such as improving services or delivering new services.

How does Vubis Smart factor into your development plans? As you further develop V-smart, what are the implications for additional Vubis Smart releases for example, and even support of Vubis Smart? Should we expect changes here?

Clemens: V-smart will not affect our Vubis Smart development plans. We will keep developing Vubis Smart - there will be additional releases and we will keep providing support and professional services for Vubis Smart.

Conderaerts: The people who doubt this should just take a look at the release notes of the upcoming release 3.0. We think this is the biggest release ever with major changes to most modules and with the introduction of a new add-on module for stack requests. And we are also nearing completion of our integrated add-on ILL module, which is scheduled for release not too far after release 3.0. This module will be available for both V-smart and Vubis Smart. And these are just a few examples that illustrate that we (emphasizes) that we have no plans at all to stop our developments for Vubis Smart.

Are there then no functional differences between Vubis Smart and V-smart?

Clemens: Well, there are some. The most prominent one is that V-smart will, in its second release, have a role based user management, - a feature set that we will not implement for Vubis Smart, due to a number of technical reasons.

If we look at the global picture in terms of development priorities, what is the position of the ILS - V-smart or Vubis Smart?

Conderaerts: Both V-smart and Vubis Smart will of course remain a critical part of our development. From a market perspective, as well as customer requirements, the ILS is an important product and one that will keep improving over time to address evolving needs. At the same time development will also re-focus its effort on implementing innovative products, strengthening non-ILS solutions and implementing new applications that are, like the ILS, critical to the operations of a library in particular in terms of marketing and user engagement. As these initiatives evolve, we will be looking to bring customers into the fold to assess potential direction and overall receptiveness to the proposed functionality. So, we did a lot over the last few years, but there is naturally more to come.

What do you consider to be the main focus for product development over the next year?

Conderaerts: The user. Last November I attended a conference on "Catalogue 2.0", - and every speaker started his or her presentation by saying "we all know

that the catalogue is only a tool, and that the user is the real goal". But then all speakers but one only talked about catalogues and the word "user" was never mentioned again. Libraries have a long way to go in their relationship with their users. We now see that more and more libraries are focusing on CRM, customer relationship management. I think that with the combination of our ILS products -Vubis Smart or V-smart- and V-insight (our statistical analysis portal) libraries have excellent tools to "manage" their customers. With version 2.0 of V-insight we will add additional functionality to allow the library to quickly detect which users use which types of materials, and how many times they use them, or which users of which libraries use the facilities of other libraries, etc. One of the main reasons why V-insight gained such success in the first months after its introduction is not only its user-friendliness, but also its power to generate very granular and sophisticated information on customers and collections, - and we will extend this with additional CRM features. But V-insight is only the beginning.

What do you mean when you say that V-insight is only the beginning?

Conderaerts: The user experience is constantly evolving - that is, the experience of the ‘end-user', the library customer - and that is probably thé major trend, not only in the sense of search or information discovery, but in the overall online, as well as offline, experience. We have now started to look at broadening our offerings to address the need for both understanding and improving the end-user experience. V-insight is the back-office side of this understanding, but we are now working on products to offer customers a user-experience they are entitled to, - well: a user-experience they expect from other sites or applications they use. Users have come to expect collaboration, sharing, visualization and a high degree of customization. This holds true for the online experience as a whole, not just for our industry. Yet libraries address these expectations - even with the new discovery tools - in a way which may fall short; discovery tools focus after all on discovery and search, leaving a wide spectrum of expectations unaccounted for. One should think in particular of libraries' online presence and the ways users can interact with the library and with each other beyond the search environment. This type of user experience, which incorporates search but should extend into new realms, will be very important as libraries look for additional ways to connect with users, to draw attention to services and to increase library usage.

So do these new offerings that focus more clearly on the ‘end-user' then complete the product portfolio?

Clemens: No, software products are never complete. Requirements constantly evolve with the emergence of new technologies and ever-changing user expectations. The key of course is to meet these requirements and expectations head-on and to keep developing software that our customers truly need.

Conderaerts: To add to this, I also think that we have just really started. All our products are now at the start of their life-cycle: V-smart, V-sources and V-insight are brand new, and even the other products in the portfolio are only available since a couple of years. The new products that we are now working on will be even more innovative, so I think it's much more a matter of being at the start than of completeness.

Thank you.

(Tamir Borensztajn)