WHAT WOULD BE THE FUTURE OF THE INTEGRATED LIBRARY SYSTEMS?

Since the advent of Integrated Library Systems (ILSs) in 1970s, they have gone from being innovative to stagnant. In recent years, the rapid advancement of web technologies and the exponential growth of electronic resources and digital contents have increasingly exposed the weakness of traditional ILSs. The lack of flexibility, interoperability, and efficiency makes the ILSs hardly meet the needs of both internal and external library users. Meanwhile Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Drupal and open source ILSs have gotten much attention due to their technological and economic advantages, and cloud computing has allowed libraries to focus on bigger pictures. Facing the unprecedented challenges, major ILS vendors are pressed to develop the next generation ILS; nonetheless, the concrete ideas of the future ILSs are still being investigated. The paper will reference the developmental history of ILSs to discuss the limitations of the current ILSs, the unavoidable transformation these systems are facing, and some aspects or features that the next-generation ILSs are expected to contain