Remember, All roads lead to Rome.

*bows head to mourn the fall of Rome*

PS My library switched to Evergreen. Never been happier

I really wish that librarians would just step up to the plate and design their own damn ILS’s. I know that it has happened infrequently at various places around the country, but it really needs to happen on a massive scale. I am hoping that OCLC’s new ILS will give company’s like Innovative and SirsiDynix a run for their money, but I’m not holding my breath.

I’d like to point out, though, that Lynn (#12) states that “only bibliographic records have a true standard” — well, yes, but — last time I checked, even academic libraries were dropping catalogers like leaves from a maple tree in October. Just who is going to maintain those standards? Some dude or dudette in Bangladesh, who provides the cheapest outsourcing service to B&T?

We are so toasted.

In the meantime, when it takes me four tries to find the right title for a patron because you cannot bleeping SORT after a search, I smile at the patron, apologize, and explain that our system was developed by blind, isolated monks who hate librarians.

Is the outdated RFP/ITT model instead of a validation/feasibility model a large reason for the stagnation and oilgopolisation of the LMS marketplace?

Sometimes, vendors are even asked to buy some essential documents for the RFP, which is another roadblock unrelated to the LMS quality. I suspect that deters many common-ownership vendors from making proposals and if private-sector vendors are made to gamble with higher stakes, they’ll plan to extract a higher return if they win. That’s how gambling usually works, isn’t it?

Nevertheless, QBPL do appear to have been treated particularly badly according to that statement. I wonder what the return fire will look like.

From what I heard Dynix wasn’t that great. Someone at Queens should have checked references and listservs before signing. My boss says that he would send anyone asking for Dynix references his Dynix problem file (all 275 pages).

I knew when I heard the news of the merger that the Dynix software was going to disappear. If it was that obvious to me, a reference librarian from Montana, it should have been obvious to all those high powered librarians in New York.

I do think you’ve hit the hammer on the head with the pricing issue, though. Libraries just don’t have enough money to sling around to get what we all claim we want. That, or we’re all willing to settle.

People talk about III, which stuffs its data into a proprietary format. Unicorn doesn’t. It uses Oracle or CISAM. Both are well-documented. Sirsi doesn’t get credit for this, and they should. It is a very unixish system.

It will be interesting to see what happens. I just wish the case had been filed by someone with a stronger case, better lawyers and without a terminal case of St. Dynix Syndrome.

The problem is often importing on the other side and doing the scripting work necessary to put it into a format that the new vendor (or open source software) can make use of. As well, the problem can be that you often need detailed knowledge of your underlying data structure to extract your data properly.

I’d question whether data extraction (and importation) can ever be easy since only bibliographic records have a true standard.

That said, yeah QBPL is mostly arguing that claims were made that were not followed through on, so it will be interesting to see how that goes in its own right.

There has been very little effort to try to make ILSes into anything that approaches what libraries actually want (reliable, with data you can get out and features you can build on yourself)

Sirsi Unicorn (or Symphony, as they renamed it to appease Dynix customers) is extremely reliable at the core, you can get your data out and you can change stuff and build on features yourself. It just takes a lot of unix knowledge to do so. And a lot of time. And institutional support. All of which are in short supply in public libraries.

That ILS software feels 20 years out of date is fair. Of course it does. The core of Unicorn is 20 years old, and other vendors aren’t doing any better. The problem that Queens Borough has with Sirsi is with sales and marketing, not with the software.

It’d be great if the open source ILSes force the traditional ILS vendors into improving, but the ILS market is a lot broader, with needs that vary far more than most people realize. The library in Buckland, MA has very different needs than the library at the World Bank.