OPALS-NA

OPALS-NA - Open-source Automated Library System (OPALS) - North America

Circa 1996, seven southern tier, New York State School Library Systems pioneered cooperative inter-library loan services for three hundred schools in their regions. Their cooperative database grew to more than 700,000 unique titles and over 3 million library holdings that the directors wanted to streamline. They envisioned using the Internet (the “open source network”) to deliver an almost paperless, inter-library loan service that could conform to the practices of each participating school library system, at a sustainable cost. The consortium developed specifications, evaluated technology alternatives and by consensus, decided to pool their resources to develop an open source solution. The "SCOOLS" initiative (South Central Organization of Library Systems)was the foundation of an advanced and stable open source application that continues to expand and evolve. The SCOOLS union catalog manages inter-library loan requests, monitors responses to prevent duplication, tracks the phases of ILL requests and responses, and includes a packing list / shipping label print feature for ILL responders. In addition to receiving ILL services, school librarians use the database’s Z39.50 client and server protocol to import MARC records and for collection development.[1]

After the successful establishment of the SCOOLS union catalog, the regional directors expanded the specifications of their open source project to include all library management functions including circulation, MARC record cataloging, online public access catalog, borrower data import, reports and notices, data management and editing tools, and portal applications.The OPALS project is a comprehensive, web-based open source integrated library system ("ILS")that is now used for resource sharing by 21 New York State ("BOCES") educational cooperative school library systems that serve over 1500 schools. There are OPALS users in the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa and China.

As the project expanded, the special relationship between librarians and developers that open source culture fosters incubated many innovative projects. Because librarians insisted that the system be Unicode compatible, OPALS users, the Library of Congress and others contributed to a cooperative internationalization project to achieve this objective [2]. Jewish school libraries in Montreal and across the United States were able to catalog collections that include books in French, English and Hebrew. The AVI CHAI Foundation funded the establishment of OPALS in over fifty libraries in Canada and the United States and a union catalog that shares their cataloging and collection development resources. [3]

While OPALS librarians author the specifications of their integrated library system, because they serve the public, they cooperatively contribute resources to ensure that experienced software engineers and technicians develop and support it. This support and development model provides an orderly framework within which programmers select, synchronize and contribute open source software functions that adapt to librarians' rapidly changing information management and delivery mission.