The OLE Project: Reconceptualizing Technology for Modern Library Workflow—An SOA Approach

The OLE Project, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is designing an Open Library Environment (OLE), a reconceptualized alternative to the current model of vendor-driven, largely self-contained, integrated library systems. The goal of this multinational group of academic, research, and national libraries is to produce a design document for a service oriented architecture (SOA)-compliant system positioned as a component of an institutional enterprise architecture. A secondary goal is to inform community-source library system development efforts regarding the tools and techniques of business process modeling and SOA architectures.