Ken Chad and Paul Miller's white paperDo Libraries Matter? The rise of Library 2.0 offers some good ideas for the ILS of the near future.

They suggest that the ILS that today's users want is one which requires very little of its users. It's fast, free, flexible, and responsive and available at any one of a variety of points of service. It works much like Google and Amazon, which means it is so easy a chimp could use it. To what extent is this really possible?

What I wonder is how we can take the best of the Google/Amazon features and combine them with the best of traditional library ILS features to create a functional, yet easier and more appealing, product.

Then there's the issue of image -- even if we have everything users want, how do we get them beyond the image of libraries = dusty,old books?

My thanks to Clara for sending me this article!!