But equation is changing fast. The argument for third-party discovery tools is getting easier to make everyday. Once we’ve added a “presentation layer” separate from the OPAC, we’ve broken vendor lock-in, and in a new world of mix and match, Open Source ILS products like Evergreen or Koha could become much more attractive, budget-wise, to slot in underneath.

GREAT blog, by the way. Keep it up!

Yeah, that’s the phrase that was also apparently used around here 10+ years ago when we started with III. BTW, a little trivia, the first generation Cadillac (’76-79) was based upon the same platform used by the Chevy Nova.

That’s our ILS — still built upon that old Chevy Nova foundation!!!

This remains my biggest disappointment with the entire ILS vendor marketplace; namely, the overly strict market segmentation of functionality and options, tightly coupled with ***an approach to software engineering that seeks to prevent customers from building even the most basic interfaces on their own, lest they find a way out of the vendor’s secret black box.***

E-commerce anyone ?? Oh, yes, you can pay patron fines! Woo hoo! But how about tightly integrating our catalogue with our Bookstore operation for e-commerce? Good luck with that one…

Or how about using the “Cadillac” of ILS’s (Innovative) to manage our sector’s publications database? Sounds like the ILS is the right tool? Nope–10 years ago we had to introduce Cuadra STAR in our shop because you can’t go beyond MARC with an ILS (support for MARC, but add your own custom field attributes, make them searchable, etc.). Remarkably, in 2006(!!) you still can’t go beyond MARC fields!! Way too many ugly hacks around even the most basic IT/IM problems.

Oh, and that Oracle ‘back-end’ we paid big bucks to facilitate some basic, more open interaction with OUR DATA — nearly useless — IMHO, just added on by Innovative (and probably most other vendors) to meet the RFP requirements. The ILS is barely using Oracle RDMS for anything else but file storage…

WebOPAC — don’t get me started on that one! Supposed to be the showcase of any library, but key aspects are guaranteed to be 2-4 years out of date with each new release… But don’t let us help out, complete control must rest with the vendor.

True enough, vendors are indeed offering lots of “innovation” — but it’s just not enough at the fundamental, application architecture level. The library community needs to smarten up about this, and make some serious demands for change..

See also my post here:
http://lists.webjunction.org/wjlists/xml4lib/2005-October/005567.html

Innovative needs to get with the program. Ok, ALL OPAC vendors need to get with the program because we are not going to take their crappy products any more. I agree they should be upset and I hope they are listening. We may have put up with this in the past, but no more!

15 years ago the system was all about the librarians keeping track of titles - now we need systems that do that and give the patrons what they’re looking for - but that’s a whole other post.

They do have a good sales team though, we were hooked and reeled in. It wasn’t until later that all the limitations and roadblocks of the system became apparent. They have done a good job of gilding a 15 year old turd.

It seems to me that the ball is in the vendors’ court right now. What they decide to do is ultimately up to them, but we may see some big “mergers” ahead.

The thing is - I don’t know what the other systems are like - for all I know they’re just as difficult. For now I’ll keep pushing Talis’ efforts and hope that one the The Platform becomes a reality.

I read your State of the ILS post and was really glad to see someone else talking about their III system.

Given all the roadblocks III has thrown our way and the fact that we’ve accomplished what we have DESPITE III not because of them, I could easily let slip a terribly scathing assessment of our experience with them for public consumption. I’ve been reluctant to do that because I don’t think it would accomplish much and would amount to a “last-resort” tactic to get them to shape up. Also, I don’t think it would make a difference.

In the meantime, I tell people not to purchase Innovative if they want to do anything, er, innovative.