[Koha] Koha and Third-Party commercial services

[Lori Bowen Ayre]

Ian,

This issue came up with Evergreen recently and someone suggested creating
an "Vendors Module."  They wrote up how it would work....maybe some useful
ideas there.

See http://egdev.mvlcstaff.org/Vendors_Module

Lori

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Lori Bowen Ayre //
Library Technology Consultant / The Galecia Group
Oversight Board & Communications Committee / Evergreen
(707) 763-6869 // Lori.Ayre at galecia.com

<Lori.Ayre at galecia.com>Specializing in open source ILS solutions, RFID,
filtering,
workflow optimization, and materials handling
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2011/11/5 Ian Walls <ian.walls at bywatersolutions.com>

> Dear Community,
>
>
> In the last few months, I've seen more and more interest in developing
> Koha support for integration with third-party commercial services.  These
> services usually require some kind of special coding to achieve that
> integration, instead of using a global standard for data transmission.  To
> be fair, I think this is often because there IS NO global standard for the
> kind of data they want to transmit.  But I'm still wary of this.
>
> All the external services we have now (Amazon, Babelthèque, Baker and
> Taylor, Google, Library Thing, Novelist Select, OCLC, Open Library, and
> Syndetics) are very self-contained; they have system preferences which just
> control whether or not a block of HTML/Javascript API code gets put into
> the template.  This is pretty benign; it's template code and some database
> data (nothing structural), and can be completely disabled if the
> preferences are turned off.  This seems like good integration to me.
>
> But other services require something a bit more heavy-weight.  Things that
> would involve writing a fair block of Perl code, or altering Koha's data
> structure to store a new kind of information (new table columns or tables,
> instead of just entries in existing tables).  Changes like this concern me,
> particularly if the service requires a subscription, is
> geographically-limited or has closed licensure.  Perhaps I'm just being
> paranoid, but it seems that if we start letting these external services
> influence the development of Koha, we could eventually wind up with an ILS
> that is no longer in the interest of the global community.
>
> Am I being crazy?  Is this a valid issue?  Are the advantages of being
> able to talk to more external products greater than the risks of a few
> specific company's products getting hardcoded into our ILS?
>
> Thanks for any feedback you can provide,
>
>
> -Ian
>
>
>
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>
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