JISC and SCONUL recently held a two day workshop at Warwick (19 and 20 January) looking at the future of the library management system. It explored what a next generation LMS might look like (or even whether one would be needed). An introductory presentation by Ben Showers can be found here as can an introductory film from Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC

Over the course of the workshop, a number of 'provocative' presentations were given, exploring visions for the future of libraries and library management systems. These included:

• a fascinating 'short story' from Paul Walk in which the market dominates the buying and selling of courses, and therefore the provisioning of learning and research resources. He drew out the implications for this in his presentation
• a rather forbidding view of the future from Ken Chad
• a paper from Paul Stainthorp which emphasised continuity with current provision, but which suggested that we would be working with a national shared ERM and smarter library spaces, and
• an amusing and challenging presentation from David Kay which draws parallels between the library community and the Roman Empire

You might also like to see Ben Shower's blog post about the workshop.