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Open Text Brings Web 2.0 to the Library

What if you could obtain an electronic version of a book that is currently checked out? What if you could listen to an interview with the author of a book to decide if you want to take it home? What if you could get digital copies of the journals and documents listed in the bibliography of a textbook?

These are just some of the questions to which Open Text hopes to guide the answer with a special version of Livelink, their enterprise content management product, customized for libraries.

Despite the continued digitization of information, libraries remain an important part of communities across the globe. People still love the feel of a book in their hands and the solitude provided in a library setting. Yet as Google makes terabytes of information available to people in an instant, the everyday relevance of the local library comes more and more into question.

Open Text, the self-proclaimed “largest independent provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software and solutions,” is looking to meet this challenge head on. Open Text offers a customized version of its Livelink ECM product called “Livelink ECM - Library Management.”

This web-based application is designed for managing library resources and automating daily library operations. And as the multi-faceted Livelink was also used to manage documents for London’s Defense and Technology Lab, this flavor of the same solution offers secured, centralized access to digital documents and objects, Internet resources, multimedia and print materials along with other content in a library’s physical collection.

Livelink ECM - Library Management also simplifies day-to-day operations such as: patron access, cataloging and maintenance of library materials, circulation processing, serial publications and administration of the purchasing process for published materials.

The impending death of the publishing industry is greatly exaggerated. With approximately 3,000 new books being published everyday, the need for a central repository of this information is not going away anytime soon.

However, libraries desperately need to update their operations and services to compete for the attention of a generation that has grown up digital and knows less of a world before Web 2.0.

For more information on Open Text’s Livelink ECM – Library Management solutions, go to: http://www.opentext.com/library.