It never ceases to amaze me how many managers and executives think that they can impose change on their staff, but it does not apply to them. I’ve been fortunate in that my recent clients do not share that philosophy….

In fact, it seems to me that a valid strategy for an ILS vendor would be to pull a Novell. Rather than try to keep Netware competitive, Novell chose to buy a Linux distribution and migrate their customer base to OSS, where they can benefit from the efforts of the whole community and put their money to use in adding value where their customers can see it. They sell support as well as “official” versions of the software. Would your library buy an Open Source ILS if it was supported by Innovative or SirsiDynix?

Beyond price, another key advantage of OSS is that it lends itself to mashups– combining existing products (all perfectly legal, of course) rather than creating from scratch. If the next generation of library software is not one “integrated” package but a collection of tools, some of them perhaps coming from other industries, the constelllation of OSS products is hard to beat. Need databases, content management systems, library-rich scripting environments? Open Source has ‘em.

That’s why things like Aquabrowser and Endeca are so appealing. But really, our current ILS vendors should be doing something about their own UI, not forcing us to go to someone else to make their stuff work well and look good.

One of the things that gets in the way of library systems innovation is the difficulty of switching core systems. All of that circulation, book handling, bar coding blah blah that’s invisible to the patron experience but crucial to the system holding together is messy even in the best of systems, and as a result libraries are rightfully scared of doing system switches very often.

This points even more to the need then for patron-facing application programming interfaces, so that the change at the user and patron level in the experience of working with the library’s catalog can change without the need for a “forklift upgrade” to haul out the old system and bring in the new one.

I wish I had more to say, but right now, YES! is all I can come up with.