Library automation market is tracking big IT vendors

Pressure from university IT departments is driving the development and adoption of library automation (LA) tools, and fuelling the current spate of mergers and acquisitions in the LA market.

That was the view of Dr Rein van Charldorp, managing director of OCLC PICA, which recently acquired Fretwell Downing Informatics (FDI). “The academicmarket is integrating its technology. As customers they are becoming very demanding.”

From his Netherlands base,Charldorp has a European wide view of the changing academic information landscape, and he sees a continentwide
pattern emerging.

Currently, different faculties have their own library and technology systems, but as universities becomemore competitive and business minded, they are moving over to business-wide applications such as the enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications offered by IT giants like IBM , SAP and Oracle. Charldorp said library automation applications have to integrate with these ERP systems.

“Students want a portal with access to their professors, eateries, elearning environments and the library,” he said. “Ultimately, the university and the IT department will set the infrastructure for the institute, and information professionals must chose systems that interoperate with that infrastructure.”

Pressures closer to home are also driving the adoption and development of LA tools. “There will be more integration with e-learning and institutional repositories (IR), which will bring in a lot more publishing and workflow technologies to the library,” he said. Institutional repositories pose a challenge, he added. “Building the IR is easy, getting the information in and out is much harder. To keep up with this pace you have to invest,” he said.

“We don’t want to compete with Oracle and SAP in the academic market, but we will have to follow closely what they are doing and become strategic partners.” This pressure to invest has driven LA market consolidation, with 2005 seeing OCLC PICA buy out FDI ( click here for details ) and the Sirsi Dynix merger. “In the last two years a lot of suppliers have been talking to each other,” Charldorp reveals. “There will be more shakeouts, as no one can keep up with the technology development alone.”

He feels the combined company has an offering that “covers all areas”. With its increased size, OCLC PICA is confident it can meet the developing technology demands that face LA vendors and its users. “20% of our staff are trained as librarians and they are very loyal to the profession.”

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