I am back from doing my teleconference, so it is back to work. One of my tasks is to bring my library up to the 21st century. One key component is to get my card catalog into an online catalog. While looking into ILS's I discoverd the blog, The integrated library system that isn't, by Lorcan Dempsey.

It is an interesting read. When I was working for a much larger medical library this truely was the case.
We had OhioLink, but we didn't really use the Acquisitions part of III because as a part of a larger institution (the hospital) we purchased things differently than most OhioLink members.

Document delivery (which we were starting to implement on a large scale before I left) really didn't communicate with our whole online system. Doctors would request articles and it was up to us to fill them by various means. The system did not check our holdings (electronic or otherwise) to determine if the person needed to request the item. It was left to us to determine that and either cancel the request (with a brief explannation) or to process it.

Those are just a few examples of how his observations really hit home in a large medical library.

Now, bring those same concerns about Integrated Library Systems to small hospital libraries. Some small libraries are just trying to stay afloat, how do they cope with such systems? Dempsey might say that a truely integrated system is especially important for a small library with few staff and resources. Saving staff time, money, and exploiting the few resources one would have is exactly what an integrated system would do for a small library. I agree with that in principle, but there is a big rub. Money. From two perspectives....
Major players like Innovative Interfaces are waaaay tooo expensive for the small libraries. Additionally, there are quite a few ILS vendors who just don't see the profit in creating something for smaller libraries. So do we as small libraries forced to wait for the trickle down effect once a true integrated system is created?
Even when it trickles down to us, can we do it, or is the nature of the small hospital library counter productive to certain things we take for granted in larger libraries. I for one don't even have an online catalog. For many of us a link resolver is simply out of our price range. PubMed is as close as we can come to that through Linkout. Those of us with severe Intranet publishing restrictions, have giant hurdles that we must try and surmount (sometimes successlly, often not) when just trying to provide the basic library information page. It took me 3 months of lobbying to be allowed to put a search box on my library's intranet site. Don't get me wrong I don't think small hospital libraries should throw up their arms in disgust and just accept fate, because then fate would close your library and leave you with no job. I just mean to express that there are other factors and hurdles to consider when small libraries are invovled.