The ‘Review of Local Government IT’  Wiki is just about to be launched. You can see it at

http://lglibtech.wikispaces.com/ We are planning a more formal launch soon.

To date we’ve been making a few limited invitations to the Wiki as we still have a little more work to do..so please be gentle for the moment! I am pleased that even though it’s very  early days we have had  a positive response and people have already got involved by correcting and adding to the information in the Wiki. It *is* very easy to do!.

The Review was to have been launched a while ago as a printed report but I had to give other projects priority and I then decided to change tack and make it a Wiki. You’ll see I have contributions from (LMS) vendors and some pieces written by librarians and others (including me).  There are also (editable) entries covering some ‘Marketplace Issues’. At the moment there are headings for  

· E-Books

· EDI

· Finance systems --interoperability with the LMS

· Open Source Library Management Systems

· RFID

· Shared Services

Some entries are relatively full (Open Source and RFID have some very useful links to resources) whilst others remain empty at the time of writing. We hope those gaps will be filled over time by the community itself and that there will be new entries made for topics of interest.

We have included a table of all UK public libraries with the *LMS* they have. There are also (incomplete) columns for RFID systems and E-Book providers. Other library related systems will be added in due course I’m sure. The great thing about a Wiki of course is that Ken Chad Consulting (or any *single* entity) doesn’t need to maintain the data--the ‘community’ does that. So we have started with just enough stuff to make it initially useful. This is intended very much as a community project...

So whilst it overlaps to some degree with the information available from the e-Government register  ( http://www.brent.gov.uk/egr.nsf/ProdTypes/Library+Management ) I think it will be more accurate and wide-ranging. It is much easier for the community to update the data and add new information. In addition you can start and contribute to ‘discussions’.

As I mentioned above, there are still some empty entries and it would be great if people would contribute to fill those gaps (and add new entries). You can log on and join the wiki now if you want.  Ken Chad Consulting will play an active role in developing a community around the Wiki and will help to enable people to contribute and develop the Wiki to make it increasingly useful to *all* stakeholders—librarians, vendors and others. Laurie Edmonds ([log in to unmask]) is the ‘wiki master’ and over the next few weeks more and more people will be invited to join the wiki.

I hope this will be a valuable contribution to enabling a more effective dialogue within the community around the issues of library systems and technologies. I look forward to your participation!

Ken

Ken Chad Consulting Ltd

Tel +44 (0)7788 727 845. Email: [log in to unmask] www.kenchadconsulting.com

Skype: kenchadconsulting
See my recent presentations on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/kenchad