Hopefully this will make Open Source a more viable option for libraries who have been holding off:

PALINET is aware that not all of our members have the technical support or skills necessary to install or test the open source applications that are currently available. We're looking at a number of ways to address this issue, but we've taken two initial steps already. First, a member Technology Caucus has begun regular discussions of open source software tools in monthly meetings. Yesterday, a group of library developers met at the PALINET offices in Philadelphia to install test copies of Koha and Evergreen for evaluation and comparison. It's my hope that we'll be able to put together a couple of really clean, well integrated, model systems, which will demonstrate the kind of functionality that is possible with these open source ILS solutions.

Second, we're just finalizing an agreement with LibLime, a leader in open source solutions for libraries, to offer discounted setup and support for the Koha Classic, and Koha Zoom ILS software. See our announcement at ALA Annual 2007.

Technorati Tags: open source, palinet, koha, evergreen, liblime

There is an awesome article in Library Philosophy and Practice 2007 by Lee David Jaffe and Greg Careaga entitled Standing up for Open Source.

While the article does talk about the fact that Open Source Software (OSS) is not used in all areas of libraries, there is an focus on the ILS.

More than three decades after libraries built the first automated systems, we now depend on commercial black box systems, despite growing evidence that the proprietary ILS has outlived its usefulness. In the intervening years, librarianship has come into its technological maturity, with a generation of tech-savvy librarians proving we have the skills in-house, and yet we cling to the belief that only a commercial entity can provide the solutions we need to manage our services.

The systems available to us, to be sure, are not mechanical beasts of science fiction nightmares. They run, usually reliably, and rarely hurt us or our users. Our issue is with their closed nature. The innards of a proprietary ILS are hidden. Often our own data is hidden from us. If we want a change, we must plead our case to the vendor and, if our request is granted, we pay for the enhancement. Adherence to standards is uncertain and therefore system A cannot talk to B. Without access to the source code we cannot engineer add-on components that we need. We wait years for critical features, then are forced to implement features we do not want.

Here! Here!

The possible reason why libraries stick with the proprietary software though, is that most libraries do not have people on their staff to tell them that access to the code and data would allow for changes - and even if they do - they may not have someone on the staff to make the changes anyway.

I think that trying to sell OSS to non-techie librarians as a way to access your data is not going to cut it. We also have to explain that these proprietary systems are built on code from the 80s and 90s. Things have been upgraded along the way, but the backbone (of most of these systems) hasn’t changed. That means that sometimes the vendors can’t make the changes you want. With an OSS ILS you have new code - code that can be updated by anyone in the world (with the right skills).

I fear that my tired brain is not making as much sense as I hope it is - so I’ll close with another line from the article and then you can go off and read it on your own.

If libraries wish to turn the tide and reclaim our place as leaders in the information world, we must position ourselves where we can best take advantage of new developments. If we want the flexibility to meet these challenges, we do not have the luxury of relying on information technology solutions that are opaque and inadaptable.

Technorati Tags: oss, open source, ils

LibLime has just announced the addition of an editions tab to the Nelsonville Public Library’s catalog (powered by Koha). In short - Koha now has FRBR!

There's been quite a lot of talk lately in library tech circles about OCLC's new commercial xISBN web service as well as similar free services available from LibraryThing and PINES. ….

I'm happy to announce that the Nelsonville Public Library has just put live a new web services module in Koha that supports all three of these services, and exposes the content in a new "˜Editions' tab on the OPAC detail page for every record.

In true Koha fashion, this option can be turned on/off by the library. It also allows you to choose whether to include results from LibraryThing and throttles the number of queries sent to xISBN in order to stay within the realms of their terms of free service.

This is way cool!!

Richard Wallis at Talis has an interesting post on a possible solution to the ILS user interface design issue. Richard mentions the biggest issue (one we all know about - but can’t seem to solve) - library users are different! Lawyers are different then students who are different than senior citizens who are different from children who are different from scientists - and so on.

So what’s Richard’s solution?

In an ideal world we would have built the student User Interface; the researcher UI, the high school UI; the reference librarian UI; the enquiry desk UI; the library science UI; the children's UI; the general public UI; the plugged-in to my citation management software UI; my google-gadget UI - all supported by variations of a catalogue each tuned to deliver results most relevant for each target user group.

Pie in the sky? If you separate the user interface from the underlying cataloguing, indexing and searching capabilities of a solution I think not. If you design the "˜catalogue' to flexibly support the searching, indexing, and relevance ranking needs of all these user groups you will be able to lay many different [cheap to produce for a library, a vendor, or even a user] UI skins on top of it.

These thin UI skins, on top of a powerful platform, are much simpler and quicker to develop, in days/weeks as against the months/years of our traditional monolithic systems. Because of this we can consider not only user-cantered design, but also user centred development.

I agree that this isn’t “Pie in the sky” - I also submit that it’s already possible with systems like Koha. Koha is built on a powerful templating system already - this means that the interface can be changed to meet the needs of the users without sacrificing the needs of the library and librarians.

Now, I have to be honest, I have only seem two library systems front and back (and soon one more) and they are III and Koha - so I don’t know if there are others out there that can also do what Koha can - but the point is - the system Richard is talking about already exists and probably just needs a few more librarians and libraries to jump on board to help with defining the different user needs.

Technorati Tags: koha, ils

Yesterday we had Joshua Ferraro from LibLime in at the library to tell us about Koha Zoom!

The day started off with a bit of history (things I didn’t know). In 1999 the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand was looking for an ILS that would meet their needs but couldn’t afford what the traditional vendors were offering. The only option was to contract out with a development group to create the right system for them. They chose Katipo Communications Ltd. When the product was done in 2000, Katipo recommended that Horowhenua release the ILS under the Open Source License. Why? Because Horowhenua’s problem was that that the company who first developed their ILS had gone out of business and they didn’t have the staff to alter the system. By making the software Open Source they would always have support from the programming community.

In 2001 the Nelsonville Public Library was looking at Koha as a possible solution for their library, but they had a big hurdle to overcome - there was no MARC support in the system. Here’s where Joshua comes in. He was working for Nelsonville and worked on adding MARC support to Koha. The great thing about Open Source is that once he was done - everyone in the US could use this system with MARC support.

Josh moved on to create LibLime. LibLime provides support and development for open source library tools - like Koha.

History lesson over

First comment - right out of the box - no customization - Koha looks better than most catalogs I’ve seen!

Josh started by showing us a search on the Nelsonville Public Library catalog for “it” (a stop word on most search engines) and the top hits returned were all different editions of Stephen King’s It!! How many other catalogs can do that? The next search was for “o” - first hit? Oprah’s O Magazine.

The system also offers a ton of different sort and refine options (all customizable for your library’s needs) and native support for RSS feeds for every search you run in the catalog.

Two neat features that caught my eye were the book bag and the virtual shelf.

You (as patron or librarian) can create a virtual shelf of resources from the catalog. Librarians can then share the URL for the shelf with patrons who come in with a related question. So if you always get at least one question a day for information on adopting a pet you could provide the link to the virtual shelf for your patron (kind of like a pathfinder - or the project function in PennTags).

The book bag is a way to mark records and then email, print, etc them all to yourself in one swoop. A future project is that you’ll be able to export these books to a citation management system like EndNote and create your bibliography right from the catalog.

Then there is the advanced search page! You can search any MARC field - there is a ton of data in our records that is never accessed. The example we saw was from Nelsonville’s Advanced Search page. Over on the right you can choose Subtypes & Collection Codes - these are fields that aren’t usually searchable - but they’re on the records - so why not?

The beauty of Koha (other than the easy to use search and easy to edit templates) is that your data is your data! Anything you enter into the database is yours to manipulate - and that means you can edit search pages like this one to search any fields you choose!

My favorite quote from the day? “That’s pretty trivial to implement” - Josh would say this whenever we asked for a feature - well most of the features

Overall, a great presentation and a great product - I can’t wait to see more!!

Technorati Tags: koha, liblime, ils

Tennant and Spalding on the Future of the Catalog
Originally uploaded by madinkbeard.

Tim Spalding of LibraryThing started out with his talk entitled “The Fun OPAC”. Tim quotes Casey Bisson who said that the OPAC was broken in three ways: usability, findability and remixability. Tim argues that that is not enough - he also thinks it’s missing funability.

He gave us an example from Big (the movie) where Tom Hanks says that one of the toy ideas isn’t fun. Tim says that everyone is a toy company now. Users expect the web to fun and easy. If a site doesn’t change from visit to visit it’s boring - and our OPACs never change!!

Unlike other speakers on this topic, Tim thinks we need to bring the catalog out front and center. He says so used to hiding it behind our websites because we’re ashamed of it - and we can’t change it (which is very true).

So, how do we make it fun?

• Allow inbound links!
  links into our catalogs are always timed out when you find them in search results. People want to link into this information and they assume it will always be there. One way to solve this is to provide a permalink - like Google maps - but I’d argue that this isn’t enough either!!
• Allow links outwards
  The more you link outwards the more people will come to you. This includes links out of your catalog. Tim said that some libraries say no to this because they won’t link to commercial sites. Tim asks, why? Your patrons know about the bookstores! Good websites don’t work like malls, where all of the exits are hidden and they try to keep you inside.
• Link around
  LibraryThing links to 500 libraries around the world and makes everything clickable (the author, title, tag, subject heading). There is also a page for every author, tag, etc etc. Most catalogs do link subjects - but nothing else. You can also link to wikipedia (people are going to go there anyway).
• Dress up your OPAC
  Dress it up with covers from Syndetics (if you get them from Amazon you have to link to them).
• Get your data out there
  Stop thinking you’re the only people who can work with your data!! Wisdom of crowds!! There are bored techies out there who want to do fun things with your data. People will think of things to do with your data that you haven’t thought of yourself.
• Provide remixable content
  Users don’t want your data. They don’t want generic new book lists, they want their own content. RSS feeds for specific searches, authors, tags. They want a way to tell people what they’re reading with widgets. If the user freely consents to show what they’re reading to others, then there are no privacy issues to worry about

Next up - Roy Tennant!!!

Roy was worried that we were all there to see Tim, but everyone stayed to hear what he had to say (well, I left a tiny bit early to make a lunch meeting - but I really really really wanted to stay).

Roy started by telling us that he refused to use the “O” word. And then told us that catalogs have no future - you’ve gotta love him!

Roy does clarify that when he says catalog he is not referring to the ILS (which libraries still need for internal operations). He is no suggesting the death of the ILS just that we rework the finding tool which is the catalog.

He sees a future where there is no local catalog and in his future, all discovery will take place on the network level. If however it stays on the local level, few people will want to limit their search to just books - they’re going to want something that can pull together all of the info on a topic no matter what format it’s in.

This means that we need to look at new models of finding information.

In the new world order, discovery will be disaggregated from the ILS (Google, Open WorldCat, meta search, others). This makess sense because users typically want to find anything they can on a topic. Now we have to explain that you have to look in different places for articles. People don’t like pain so they want to search in one spot and if they can’t then they won’t use your tool.

Most ILS lack cool new features and fall behind our expectations and the market doesn’t look great that we’re going to see these things anytime soon.

Open WorldCat is offering some of the cool tools we want (facets, integrated article index, clean easy to read display) all for free. They also have WorldCat Identities tool which allows for every author to have a page. Maybe the answer is that WorldCat replaces our union catalogs. OCLC already has all of our data (I don’t quite follow this - not being a cataloger - but it sounds good to me). Another tool that they have is Fiction Finder (both this and Identities like the things Tim was talking about with LibraryThing).

These tools are great at exposing the richness of the records we’ve been painfully creating over the years (and this is true - i had a horrible time creating MARC records for one of my assignments).

At this point I had to leave for lunch - but it all makes sense to me and I’ll keep an eye out to see if Roy’s predictions come true!

Technorati Tags: cil2007, cil07

How cool is this?? I just stumbled across this via someone else’s del.icio.us bookmarks. It’s an ILS Chooser! From the about page:

Source of data: Wayne, R. (2006). Helping You Buy: Integrated Library Systems. Computers in Libraries, 26, 23-31.
This exhibit could not have been done without the Wayne survey data.

I also took the information on popularity from Marshall Breeding’s lib-web-cats database: http://www.librarytechnology.org/libwebcats/
I did a simple search by ILS and took the number of hits, so this is only a very general way of gauging popularity.

I went through and picked things that were important to me and my library - and I got two options - bet you can guess which one wasn’t on the list

Number one on my results list was Koha!!! Good thing we’re going to have a demo this month

This tool has a lot of potential - I can’t wait to see it grow.

Technorati Tags: ils

I found this video via The Shifted Librarian. It’s an illustration of what users at PSU have to go through in order to find a copy of Time Magazine.

Yikes! Why do we put our users through this???

Dave Pattern is asking us to answer a quick survey:

I’m giving a short presentation about OPACs at the Library and Information Show in April and I’d love to know what you think about the subject. I’m planning to include results from this quick survey in my presentation and I’ll post the full results on my weblog.

I think it should only take a few minutes to complete the survey and please don’t feel you have to answer everything!

Dave Pattern
Library Systems Manager
University of Huddersfield, UK

Fill it out here.

I just found this article via OPL Plus (one of my favorite blogs) which gives tips on managing technology change the right way.

My favorite tips are #2 & 3:

2. Don't get emotionally attached to a particular technology.

Once we've been using something for a while, we tend to get comfortable with it. It's easy to look at a particular product that has a certain limited set of features (as all products do), and try to bend that product around the problem we are trying to solve.

When approaching a particular problem that needs to be solved, be technologically agnostic. Instead of trying to wrap that technology around your problem, approach the problem with several different possible technologies that might work.

3. Continuously research competing technologies to the ones you are using now.

While Product X may have been the best product for the technology challenge you had two years ago, the market for that particular technology may have changed quite dramatically since you last had the problem in question.

Product Y may now do in half the time what Product X does for you now.

Can you guess why? Because it touches on my favorite ranting topic - the ILS. Yes, the system you have might have been the best for you in 1994 - but things have changed a lot since then. Change in painful no matter when you start the process - but it’s a necessary part of life and business.

So - get out there and start researching - you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what you find!

Steven Cohen points us to III’s Flickr account. And Michael Stephens wonders if they actually have read the Cluetrain Manifesto.

So, we have a vendor that is rather infamous in the biblioblogosphere adopting a 2.0 tool and some of the most unique and respected voices in our profession saying “Hey, vendors..wake up! The world is changing…” Interesting synchronicity. I wonder if the folks at iii did indeed read the Cluetrain?

The fact of the matter is - I don’t care if they have a MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Zoho, YouTube, and ITunes account - I want them to provide the 2.0 tools to their customers. It’s great that they’re out there - hopefully they’ll learn something - but based on the last presentation I attended - nothing is changing. Providing a shell for their legacy software that makes it look a fancy and Web 2.0ey does not make a Web 2.0 application - and it certainly won’t be user (or web team) friendly. Having a Flickr account doesn’t mean they’re going to listen to their customers and open up their system to allow us the control we need and pay for.

Maybe I’m wrong - Maybe I’m just in a bad mood - but I’m not impressed.

I LOVE IT!!

Dear ILS Vendor:

Like it or not, your world has changed. Libraries now have reasonable ILS options beyond proprietary offerings. Not only are there open source applications like Koha and Evergreen, there are outfits like LibLime and Equinox Software lined up to provide support.
***
So what should you do? I’m sorry, but you get paid a lot of money to figure that out, so you can hardly expect me to give it away for free. But it may be sufficient to say that you can’t simply provide incremental changes to your legacy code.

This from a letter on TechEssence written by Roy Tennant.

You all already know that I agree 100,000% - but there is still the problem of convincing libraries that open source is actually a viable option. Open source != no support - like Roy says, there are companies out there supporting these applications.

Transitioning to a new ILS is scary! And messy. I know that - but it’s even more scary that your library has to make cuts in other areas of the library budget because the ILS vendor is charging you more than a librarian’s salary per year. I suck a math - but it seems like a no brainer to me!

So, not only to I agree with Roy - but I agree with John Blyberg who warns libraries that they too need to catch up with the times.

I’m still reading The Long Tail - and hoping to finish it today since the next term starts tomorrow - no more reading for fun Last night before bed, I was reading the section that starts on page 156 titled In the Library of Misshelved Books. I was reading so many great things that I had to go get my post-its so I could mark these pages to mention to you all this morning.

While reading these pages I kept thinking back to David Weinberger’s keynote from KMWorld & Intranets 2006. Anderson talks a lot about the limitations of physical space when it comes to the long tail.

One of the most vexing problems with physical goods is that they force us into crude categorization and static taxonomies … That means that the windbreaker can be in the “Jackets” section or the “Sports” section, but not in the “Blue” or “Nylon” sections. Generally, this isn’t seen as a big problem, since most of those categories would be silly for most people … With the evolution of online retail, however, has come the revelation that being able to recategorize and rearrange products on the fly unlocks their real value.

Anderson goes on to show the limits of the Dewey Decimal System “which divides the world of knowledge into ten top-level categories” - only 10?? What were we thinking? This is where it reminded me of my summary of Weinberger’s keynote:

It's as if libraries were invented to keep ideas apart. Where do you put a book about the history of military cooking? You can't put it in all 3 places because of the rules of matter, books can only be in one place at one time.

Anderson talks about the Seattle Public Library re-construction and how architect Rem Koolhaas “faced the challenge of making stacks of books fit into a search-engine culture. There were a few pictures I found in the library’s photo slideshow that helped me see what Anderson was talking about (one, two, three). The only thing I noticed in these pictures that was different from other libraries I had been in was that the Dewey numbers are on the floor beside the shelves. The fact of the matter is:

Yet even within this commendably flexible system, [Koolhaas] obviously need to arrange the books in some order. Since it takes more than the turn of a century or two to change library culture, that order was our friend the Dewey Decimal System.

I’m not sure that library culture is 100% to blame for the limitations of our physical spaces, but I do see where Anderson is coming from. As a consumer, it’s important for us to be able to find what we’re looking for without having to ask for help. This brings us back to my post last week about the usability of our public libraries. Something has to change if we want people to find what they’re looking for.

It’s be belief that that something is going to have to be our catalogs. We can’t help that the laws of physics say that one book can only take up one space on a shelf - but we can help that our catalogs are only searchable by a few main categories - and even those aren’t helpful. Until I worked in a library I didn’t realize (and this may not be true of all systems) that a title search only searches for titles that start with the words you’re typing it!! So if I want to find books with HTML in the title I have to do a keyword search and sort through all of the garbage to find what I’m looking for. Why is there so much garbage? Because HTML could be in a link in the description of the book (ex: page.html) - not very helpful if I want a book on learning HTML.

When I develop a new database for work I always make it clear to my users that they can search anything they want - in any combination - and I do my absolute best to provide them with the tools to do just that. The same should be true for our catalogs - even though I already knew this - this book as really brought this truth home. It’s time for librarians to stand up and demand more - and if we’re not getting it we need to be out there making it - or helping those who are already making it.

Why should it take the “turn of a century or two” for us to change our culture? Why, when there are so many of us out there with the skills to make the change ourselves? I make this promise to you all - I’m not all talk - when I finish my MLIS I’m going to take the time to learn everything I can about the way we catalog and the way people want to use our catalogs - and then I’m going to find someone who wants my help. We can’t just all sit around and complain over and over - we need to be out there doing something about it - and that’s my goal - I’m going to DO something!

Or something like that I just read about Koha ZOOM at the Nelsonville Public Library System via oss4lib and it sounds yummy!

LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, announced today that the Nelsonville Public Library System in Athens Ohio has just gone live with Koha ZOOM, and they couldn’t be more pleased. Koha ZOOM includes a powerful, full-featured search engine based on Zebra, a high-performance indexing and retrieval engine. Koha ZOOM catapults Koha into the big leagues, improving standards-compliance, eliminating scalability limitations, and offering some of the most advanced searching technologies available. For those libraries who have been waiting for an open-source ILS that rivals the expensive proprietary systems, the wait is over. Koha ZOOM is a true enterprise-class ILS, suitable for even the largest of collections.

And in true Open Source form:

Of course, the true power of open-source is in the ability to customize and to steer the direction of development. The integration of Koha and Zebra is yet another success story demonstrating the power of open-source software collaboration. As with all open-source projects, the value of sponsored development is in quality assurance. Purchasing development services guarantees that adequate time and resources are allocated to creating a production-ready product. No one library has to shoulder all development costs and, unlike proprietary software, all libraries using the product are not forced to foot the bill for development by paying hefty annual licensing fees. Libraries benefit from the developments sponsored or contributed by other libraries. Everyone wins.

That’s the whole point isn’t it? For us all to help each other so that we can all have amazing (user-friendly) resources to offer our users? I love it!!

I just got a mailing from Syndetic Solutions that offers a product that will add music & video clips to your library catalog - just like Amazon does with you look at a CD for sale.

As a law library our videos and CDs are all recordings of training sessions - but this sounds like a fun add on for a public library. If your catalog is using this let me know - I’d love to see it in action.

That’s all I can say about this post over at TechnoBiblio. The more of us that switch to open source the more likely things will start to change in ILS Vendorland.

I was just watching Andrew Pace’s presentation from the PALINET Conference (I couldn’t go - same time as IL this year) and I’m totally wishing I could have heard his talk - the presentation has a lot more meat than most, so I recommend you view it.

My favorite quote?

“Most integrated library systems, as they are currently configured and used, should be removed from public view.” from Roy Tennant.

Anyway, I hope I can find a recording of this talk — soon!

I was just sent a link to the Nelsonville Pulic Library catalog - powered by Koha - and it’s pretty darn - well - pretty

It’s a fresh design and has some neat features like Refine Your Search, Cover Images, Availability (right on the results page), Reviews, and fancy graphics throughout that make it a more fun experience.

Technorati Tags: ILS, Koha

Just learned something else new from Chris at Koha. I mentioned that I’d like to be able to test Koha for a class in library school - and he mentioned that the U of Buffalo has a class that does just that.

The Koha@buffalo Project is for Master of Library Science students to participate the global open source activities. In the participation, students will become familiar with the increasingly popular LAMP, Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl, technologies.

How neat is that??!!

I’m loving having IM open!

This morning I got to talk to Chris, a Koha developer. He gave me a link to a list of Koha libraries. The one thing to keep in mind is that this is just a list of the libraries that have told them they’re using Koha - there may be others out there (if you’re one of them make sure you get added to this list).

Another place to see what ILS people are using is lib-web-cats (if your library isn’t listed - it should be ).

Why is it that when open source is mentioned some people (librarians/techies/programmers/etc) get mean? I have not had a chance to read Software and Collaboration in Higher Education: A Study of Open Source Software by Paul N. Couran (Principal Investigator) and Rebecca J. Griffith - but after reading some comments I will be making time today.

Over at The Medium is the Message, Eric asks Are OPAC Vendors Days Numbered? He states:

I suspect the the combination of open source and the reluctance of vendors to keep their systems up to date will result result in the demise of significant number of commerical library vendors in the next five years. The poor performance and outdated products of commercial OPAC products is due largely to the disconnect between developers in software firms and their customers. This should be an advantage to library developers, and the timing to look at open source networks/incubators is ripe.

To which commenter bcarson responds:

I have worked in five different public, academic and medical libraries and with five different library systems. (Innovative, NOTIS, Dynix, some Mac-based system whose name is the one thing I can’t remember about it, and a homegrown system that was easily the worst of the lot).

What ever happened to “if at first you don’t succeed try, try again”?

First - homegrown (to me) means built in-house. If you don’t have a programmer in-house that cares about libraries and what the librarians want and need - you’re going to get a substandard application. Our library has applications built by outside programmers and applications written by me - and if I do say so myself, the time I spend researching our librarians needs far outweighs the time the outsiders spent. This is why you want a librarian or library supporter to write your code - not a computer programmer who thinks he/she knows what’s best despite the cries of the staff.

Second - just because you tried one “homegrown” application does not mean that all open source options are bad! Open source is just now coming into its own - it’s growing in support - which means it’s growing in user base - which means you have a much large community to help support and upgrade your application. And with some/most open source applications - it costs you nothing but time to give it a try before bashing it.

Another commenter, Darla Grediagin, mentions that she and her library are switching to Koha.

I will be able to stop giving money away to a company for support every year and use that money to add the bells and whistles that I want to my system. The only problem with the additions I make, Hmmm…. I have to share them with others. Wow, what is one of the major components of a librarian — we share. I think open source will be a great way to go.

She too is met with a skeptical (and rather rude) commenter (on her blog post - not her comment).

It just makes me angry when people dismiss open source because it’s free or because it’s not supported by a big company. As far as I’m concerned big companies are great - but they’re full of faceless people who don’t know me or my library. If I can develop (and support) something for my library or any other library and then am given the opportunity to share that code with other libraries to make their lives easier - I’m all for it!

I agree with Darla - sharing is a major part of being a librarian - and open source is all about sharing - see the connection??

Yesterday I got my first blog-related phone call! Yep, George D called me out of the blue because he had just read my Touched a Nerve post (which was a response to my State of our ILS post) and wanted to chat (and rant) about III and the future of catalogs in general.

I was able to point George to some more resources on the changing nature of the catalog, including my summary of Paul Miller’s presentation at CIL2006 and the Next generation catalogs for libraries listserv. I forgot to point out a few more resources right here at What I Learned Today….

Since the post is way down in my archives I wanted to bring everyone’s attention to George’s comments. Also he brought up an interesting bit of trivia I wanted to share with everyone (because it was just too funny).

George called III the “Cadillac” of ILS’s - which I found interesting because my director called it that a while ago too. He then points out:

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!!!

How funny is that?? It’s so true - I guess III is a “Cadillac” - but it’s a first generation “Cadillac”.

You can view George’s other comments by reading the original thread.

John Blyberg has a great summary post of the fiasco that seems to have started with my State of our ILS post. I advise you to read it and see all the different sides of the story. I also left a pretty long comment on John’s post, so I’ll let you read my points over there.

Iris over and Pegasus Librarian has a post explaining a little bit of why our library systems are the way they are. She says that she can empathize with vendors like Innovative, but not sympathize with them.

I’d take that one step further - I empathize with the staff - the people in charge of the programming - but they’re not the ones making the decisions, they’re just doing their jobs. The people making the decisions are the ones I have problem with - they’re the ones who need to take a step back, re-think things, listen to their programmers, and more importantly - they should be listening to us - the customer.

Iris says:

If [the ILS] were modular, each part could be engineered by people who had time to keep up with technology. If it were modular, the discovery system wouldn’t have to be designed by companies that excel in collection or budget management, for example.

There would be new problems with this modular approach, of course, and standards would have to be clear so that the modules could be seamlessly interoperable. But having a system that’s so big that obsolete code can’t be fixed unless the entire section is being reworked anyway is a long way from a perfect solution.

I agree - so no tar & feathers here.

Daniel Chudnov has a post over at One Big Library stating the problems with the ILS Customer Bill of Rights. While I agree with his points - he missed a big one. Since I was busy all day, someone beat me to pointing it out:

I think I understand where he is coming from. But I think the disconnect for me comes a bit earlier in his post when Chudnov writes “you can choose NOT TO BUY THE FREAKIN’ PRODUCT.”

Well, no we can’t. I sure can’t. I can’t go in and cancel my library’s contract with our vendor. I didn’t sign the original contract, and neither did my director. That decision was made at least one director ago.

And even if I could move my library over to Evergreen tomorrow I wouldn’t because I am fairly certain that such a move would torpedo my library’s participation in our state-wide lending network, which is absolutely vital to our college’s population. Which isn’t to say that Evergreen couldn’t handle such a network, as it is being developed for Georgia’s statewide library network, PINES; it just means that I’d have a whole heck of a lot of people to convince that this was a good idea.

That from Steve Lawson at See Also.

See, in a perfect world we’d be able to make the switch from one system to another without much worry - but it’s not a perfect world. As I’ve said before I’m all for libraries getting together to come up with an open-source option designed by librarians for libraries - but I’m not the decision maker - I’m not even a “real” librarian.

In our case, the system was purchased 16 years ago and has become integrated into our library. In my opinion, this is a bad thing - in the opinions of the IT staff members - this is a bad thing - in the opinion of at least 1/2 the staff this is a bad thing - but none of that matters because it is not our choice and it is not our decision - we have to work with what we’re given.

This means that it’s up the vendors to make systems that are easy for everyone to work with. Catalogers are not the only ones using these systems anymore - the web teams are using them - the IT departments are using them and 1/2 the staff needs to work with them - they are no longer cataloging systems - they are “integrated library systems” and they should work for everyone in the library.

I know that was a bit of a rant, but Daniel’s post has set me off - not because he’s upset me - but because he has just reminded me that I have no control over the situation. There is nothing I can do to change the system my library is using and no amount of explaining the reasons we should move to open-source will make any bit of difference (at least not in any timely sort of fashion).

See Daniel, I wish it was as easy as you make it sound - and I’m thankful to the people out there who are working on better solutions - and like I said in a comment on Tame the Web - in one year when I have my MLS and I’m a “real” librarian - I will be ready to join forces with any libraries or librarians that want to build a better system from the ground up.

Now if everyone who was unsatisfied with their ILS vendor (and I know there are a lot of you - and most of you have the same system I do) were to up and switch to an Open-Source option - it would be hard and it would cause all kinds of uproar in our libraries (event though you'll be saving thousands of dollars) - but it would also cause uproar among the vendors - causing them to look at their systems and their practices and make some changes! Once again - that’s one of those perfect world situations - but I can dream can’t I?