Lettertray

Dealing with ILS (Integrated Library Systems) is probably the most drab and tedious part of my job, and, unfortunately fairly integral (ha ha). I find discussions about ILS issues to be generally uninteresting, hence a lengthy blog post about them.

Marshall Breeding, of http://www.librarytechnology.org, just posted the results of a survey he conducted about the level of satisfaction among ILS customers in regard to their respective systems. The report is available at http://www.librarytechnology.org/perceptions2007.pl. The most sad/interesting thing from my perspective is that Voyager, which is the system I work with, is waaaaaaaay down at the bottom of the list - as is its sister product, ALEPH. It’s no surprise to me - Voyager is poorly designed, poorly supported, and generally crappy product. What is interesting too is that the most enthusiastic supporters of open-source ILS projects are those from libraries running these crappy systems.

Part of the problem, in my humble, is that librarians still have a very consumerist attitude when it comes to their technology. The catalog and the technologies that support it, are products that you buy and then you make an effort to live with them. Ten years later, you repeat the process. In my mind, this mentality is akin to our culture’s adherence to the gas-combustion engine and coal-derived electric prower for most of our infrastructure needs. In the days of nanotechnology, ultra-efficient electronics, and ubiquitous computing, it is absurd that we cling to century-old technologies for our most fundamental needs. But we do. It’s also absurd that libraries - institutions that should be much more agile - still cling to this notion that their core technologies should take the form of large, unwieldy, local databases provided at enormous expense by private companies who really have no financial interest in improving their ILS products for more than half of their life-cycle. Once a product is 5 years old, the number of new customers dwindles and cash flow becomes scarce until the next generation comes out 5 years later. I would be very nice if libraries, collectively, put an end to this industry for good, and embraced systems that could be developed continuously, for the common good.

I’m a bit of a hypocrite, because I don’t know if I’d be able to sell that idea to our administration when the time comes to ditch Voyager, but it’s something to shoot for I guess…