My pal and admitted "library provocateur" Andrew Pace recently blogged about theconsolidation and commoditization of the integrated library system (ILS) market. I say it's about darn time.

I think we are finally waking up to the fact that while the ILS is clearly not the center of our user's universe, it shouldn't even be the center of our universe. It?s a tool that makes our lives a lot easier and more effective, but it is not the way in which we should provide access to information. Certainly Andrew's institution is a good example of a library that pushed its ILS into the back room (where I've long said it belongs) in order to provide a more useful finding tool.

Admittedly, NCSU's Endeca-powered catalog only covers the same information provided by the ILS (the holdings of the NCSU library), but it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to conceive of a finding tool that goes well beyond such boundaries.

In fact, many libraries have already moved beyond those boundaries through metasearch software, although few have been brave enough to reduce the role of their ILS as a finding tool. One library that has is the University of Washington Libraries, which recently unveiled a locally branded slice of OCLC's Open WorldCat (see the search box on their homepage). Dubbed WorldCat Local, this new offering by OCLC is the first finding tool that seamlessly combines library holdings from a local collection, a regional cooperative, and the entirety of WorldCat all in one long list of search results. Local search results appear first, followed by regional holdings, then finally the rest. The University of Washington ILS continues to perform all the traditional tasks except for user searching, including providing information on whether an item is checked out or not to their WorldCat Local implementation. And now that the Open WorldCat platform (that powers WorldCat Local) includes articles, it indicates OCLC's plans to make Open WorldCat a unified search platform. [Full disclosure: I recently joined OCLC]

Traditional ILS vendors are not far behind with their own solutions for unified searching, with, among others, ExLibris working hard on their Primo software, and Innovative Interfaces developing Encore.

It's clear that the trend is to provide one-stop shopping for library users to discover all that our libraries can provide for them, and this is a good thing. Part of this trend is thus to reduce the public service role of the ILS and return it to what it began life as ? a tool for automating the basic business tasks libraries must perform to collect, organize, and provide access to a collection of materials. It's the center of no one's universe and we should stop treating it as if it is.

What's important is to have an ILS that is as efficient as possible in doing the day-to-day tasks of library management while making it easy to extract information from it to power unified finding tools such as those I've mentioned above. Anything more than that is just a waste of time, and the consolidation, simplification, and commoditization of the ILS market may finally help us realize that it is, after all, just a part of our infrastructure and not even the most important part -- at least from the point of view of the people we serve.