I’m getting close to the deadline for that Library 2.0 article for Colorado Libraries that I have mentioned before, and I’m finding it a bit of a challenge to break my habit of writing for the web.

I’d like to write a paragraph or two about the current state of the ILS and the online catalog (does everyone else hate the word OPAC as much as I do?), so my natural inclination is to write something like this:

John Blyberg’s ILS Customer Bill of Rights kicked off a lot of discussion regarding what libraries might demand of ILS vendors, especially in terms of enabling individual libraries to create our own services to sit on top of the ILS. The new North Carolina State University library catalog, which uses an Endeca front-end on top of its Sirsi catalog, and Casey Bisson’s WordPress front-end for a III catalog are two examples of experiments in this vein, while the report of the University of California’s Bibliographic Services Task Force, Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California (PDF) puts some of the same concerns in the wider context of an enormous state university system.

Now, that paragraph might not be brilliant online, but in print, without hyperlinks, it would be downright impenetrable. So back to the drawing board to figure out how much context I need to provide for readers who haven’t been following along online for the past six months, and who I doubt will be keying in long URLs from the bibliography.

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