Planning Strategically, Designing Architecturally: A Framework for Digital Library Services

Abstract

In an era of unprecedented technological innovation and evolving user expectations and information seeking behaviour, we are arguably now an online society, with digital services increasingly common and increasingly preferred. As a trusted information provider, libraries are in an advantageous position to respond, but this requires integrated strategic and enterprise architecture planning, for information technology (IT) has evolved from a support role to a strategic role, providing the core management systems, communication networks, and delivery channels of the modern library. Further, IT components do not function in isolation from one another, but are interdependent elements of distributed and multidimensional systems encompassing people, processes, and technologies, which must consider social, economic, legal, organisational, and ergonomic requirements and relationships, as well as being logically sound from a technical perspective. Strategic planning provides direction, while enterprise architecture strategically aligns and holistically integrates business and information system architectures. While challenging, such integrated planning should be regarded as an opportunity for the library to evolve as an enterprise in the digital age, or at minimum, to simply keep pace with societal change and alternative service providers. Without strategy, a library risks being directed by outside forces with independent motivations and inadequate understanding of its broader societal role. Without enterprise architecture, it risks technological disparity, redundancy, and obsolescence. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this conceptual paper provides an integrated framework for strategic and architectural planning of digital library services. The concept of the library as an enterprise is also introduced.

The Albert Einstein archives digitization project: opening hidden treasures

“…Steven Buchanan (2010) describes the importance of preparing a strategic plan in order to design digital library services and affirms that the key to any successful project starts with such a plan. Understanding the archival material on the one hand as cultural heritage [10] and on the other hand as science information [11] (Chowdhury, 2010) was the base for developing the strategy of this project.…”

“…Understanding the archival material on the one hand as cultural heritage [10] and on the other hand as science information [11] (Chowdhury, 2010) was the base for developing the strategy of this project. This strategy was based on the holistic relationships and analysis of the following components: information management, information technology and information content as illustrated by Figure 1 (Buchanan, 2010).…”

Digital Library Collaboration: A Service-Oriented Perspective

“…A process perspective also facilitates the development of service-oriented architecture (SOA), with process modeling one of the first recommended SOA steps in order to identify candidate application services and shared information [63]. 5 If we take the cultural sector as an example (given the degree of natural synergy identified), a number of common processes and/or services between public libraries, museums, and archives have already been variously identified, including reference, digitization, heritage, genealogy, and subscription services [3,64,65]. In the context of Zorich et al's "collaboration continuum" (see sec.…”

“…As a consequence, the authors, drawing on personal practitioner experience and utilizing a previously developed approach to process mapping [62], have identified the key processes involved in the delivery of services across the main participants in the cultural sector, extending beyond libraries, museums, and archives to performing and visual arts bodies as well as public broadcasting organizations. This is based on a typology of processes by Gibb and colleagues [66], which we believe encourages a comprehensive perspective: 5. In a SOA, services are loosely coupled, reusable, and sharable "modules of business or application functionality with exposed interfaces invoked by messages from service consumers" [63, p. 34].…”

Evaluating the strategic plans of public libraries: An inspection-based approach

“…Various strategic planning frameworks and processes have been proposed over time, but Buchanan (2010) argues that although terminology differs across authors, there is underlying commonality of purpose. Buchanan illustrates this point by comparing public and private sector frameworks (Chaffey, 2002 writing for e-business; Roberts and Rowley, 2004 writing for information services; Allison and Kaye, 2005 writing for non-profit organisations), mapping commonality, and distilling the planning process down to four common steps: internal/external organisational ÔanalysisÕ; ÔformulationÕ of plans; ÔimplementationÕ of plans; and ÔevaluationÕ of outcomes.…”