> Last August I sent a message to this list soliciting responses to a
> survey that I was conducting on libraries perceptions of their library
> automation systems, the companies that provide them, and on attitudes
> toward open source ILS.
Since most of the respondents were from small publics, it would be
very interesting to know how responses break down by library type or
by role of the respondent. I suspect that black box solutions would be
less popular with institutions that offer a more complex array of
services or when answered by someone actually responsible for making
everything work together.
The real question is how the products in the survey will adapt our
brave new world where the ILS isn't the center of the universe. The
point isn't if people like company X or OSS, but whether patrons and
staff can do their work easily and efficiently. Given the amount of
hacking it takes to tie everything together, we have a long way to go.
Currently, there are strong financial incentives to create products
that don't play well with each other. Despite our supposedly free
markets, vendors can get miffed if you even consider competing
products or building your own. Even Microsoft and Google don't have
the resources to do it all, so you'd think it would be a pretty tall
order for a single vendor to fulfill all your library needs.
Just as the entertainment industry found that consumers weren't
willing to buy movies or music that were too difficult to use as
needed, libraries need to use the RFP process to bring about APIs and
protocol support that will make the ILS work well with the other
services that libraries provide. Everyone has enough to do without the
extra load imposed by intentionally hobbled software that pretends
it's the only thing we work with.
kyle
Received on Wed Jan 23 2008 - 15:37:14 EST