Open Letter to ILS Vendors
"On September 5, 2006, over 250 libraries in the Georgia consortium, PINES, began using a next-generation integrated library system (ILS) they wrote from scratch. Within two months they racked up two million checkouts and half-a-million renewals for a collection of eight million items and 1.5 million borrowers." — "Dawn of a New Era," Library Journal, February 15, 2007.
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.
Libraries would be stupid to not give serious consideration to transitioning to an open source solution and save thousands of dollars while gaining the latest in cutting edge technology at the same time.
Perhaps now is the time to consider the experiences of the Eastman Kodak company, which is also trying to transition into a new era. Since they are ahead of you in their efforts to save their company perhaps their lessons as described in the article Mistakes Made on the Road to Innovation" in Business Week might be helpful. In sum, they are:
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- Watch for treacherous shifts
- Get your best people behind the program
- Give your new initiatives room to breathe
- Make painful breaks with the past
- Don't confuse what your company does with how it does it
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. You need to think strategically and invest in some serious re-engineering. You need to be thinking imaginatively and innovating like your life depends on it. Oh, oops, it does. Silly me.
Sincerely,
Thanks so much for posting this! For a couple of years now, i have been really worried about library vendors (ILS as well as database). They do not seem to be embracing the changes that widespread use of the web has introduced to us and our patrons/customers.
Instead of producing more modules with the same old interface, why don't they completely revisit the structure? It is a risk, but I think it is actually a bigger risk not to change it substantially. Who wants to use a system that still looks like it was designed in 1995?
twila f.
Kudos, Roy, for articulating this. But it bothers me a little that we berate the ILS vendors for doing, more or less, what we've asked for. When I look over the enhancement requests we've submitted over the years, I see an awful lot about printing circ slips and minutiae about which MARC subfields get indexed and searched - and almost nothing about the public interface. Nothing about tagging, exposing records to search engines, APIs to play well with others. Am I just not seeing the meatier, more clueful requests?
No, Thomas, you haven't missed the requests we should have been making because we, by and large, did not make them. You are correct, and I often say this in talks I give, that there is plenty of blame to go around. We're all responsible for where we sit. The thing is, though, that libraries are not required to stick with the bad situation they helped make, they can leave their vendors holding the bag. So I actually think the vendors are in a much worse situation and therefore need to act rapidly and decisively to keep us as customers.
That is one of the best and most relevant letters I've had the privilege of reading in a long time!
Thank you Roy!
It's all about sharing!