The OLE Final Report is out and it begins with a “research scenario” that OLE is striving to support.  In other words, the library software they are planning to develop (in the next phase which is code named the Kuali OLE Project) could make the following scenario a reality…

An economist is conducting research on the housing market financial collapse. She needs raw economic data as well as secondary data, policy documents, and a host of other materials available in print and electronic form. Her campus uses OLE, which manages all campus collections and information-resource subscriptions and is also integrated into the campus learning management system (LMS), the accounting, human resources and student systems, and other major technology systems—as well as several consortia to which the library or the campus belongs, such as OCLC and the Hathi Trust.

Moving toward a draft document, she transfers materials into a word processor. Thanks to OLE, each arrives with full bibliographic metadata attached and ready to auto-format (via tools such as Zotero) into a form suitable for the academic journal she is targeting. When she is ready to share, she stores a copy of the draft in her institutional repository (via an OLE-aware interface) and sends a link to her various academic (social) networking venues, to invite public comment.

In Mark Leggott’s lengthy response to Stephen Abram’s article, he challenges many of Abram’s claims and does so from his own  relevant experience:  Leggott is from the University of Prince Edward Island which migrated off SirsiDynix Unicorn to Evergreen.

The following four issues (fears) often come up for people when they first start looking into an OSLS (open source library system):

1. Total Cost of Ownership (Don’t  OSLS products really cost more by the time you hire the staff you need to run them?)
2. Features (I understand OSLS products don’t have all the features of a mature ILS product.)
3. User Friendliness (An open source system will be too hard for our customers to use.)
4. Difficult to Deploy (There’s no way our staff could install and implement an open source ILS on their own!)

The following four excerpts address these issues very effectively.   I hope you’ll read the entire Leggott article but in case you don’t, at least read these excerpts!

Abram: The open source proponents state that it has a much lower price and a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO). What they tend to leave out, however, are the entry costs of switching systems.

Leggott:  Open source does (in my experience) have a much lower TCO. As one example, UPEI moved from the SD Unicorn ILS to Evergreen in just over 2 months, including buying new hardware, hiring a contractor and acquiring a 1-year Equinox platinum support agreement for LESS than what we paid for a year’s maintenance for Unicorn. With what was left over we paid developers to add some functionality to Evergreen, some of which found its way back to the project. That kind of giving back to the community feature of open source is hard to assign a value to, but it is many times greater than the effort you typically put into a closed proprietary system, further enhancing the TCO of open source.

<…>

Abram: Generally, the available open source ILS platforms have less than half of the features and functions of any SirsiDynix ILS.

Leggott: The great benefit of open source products is that they are part of a rich and vibrant ecosystem where you are free to mix and match products to suit your local needs. While the current Evergreen does not have the same full functionality as the flavour-of-the-month-SD ILS (e.g. no serials management), UPEI was able to construct a BETTER for us ILS ecosystem by using the CUFTS open source system to manage all our serials – print and digital. This would be a challenge, or downright impossible, with a system like Unicorn. The Library community does not need more closed ILS systems, we need more OLAFs – Open Library Applications Frameworks. A better way to make this statement would be “The available open source ILS frameworks will always have more features and functions than any SD ILS.”

<…>

Abram:  Proprietary software is much more user-friendly.

Leggott:  Hmmm. One of the most interesting outcomes of our switch from Unicorn to Evergreen was the comments our student assistants made when they came back from summer break and discovered a new ILS: This software is a lot easier to use. Our staff training with Evergreen also took a fraction of the time it did with the switch to Unicorn.

<…>

Abram: Is open source harder to deploy?

Leggott:  No. Our implementation of Evergreen took a fraction of the time that Unicorn did at UPEI. Also, because we are proactively investing staff time and money in more useful open source/LAMP type skills, our staff can easily install most open source software stacks, giving us a great deal of flexibility. At UPEI all our current software applications (with the exception of RefWorks and desktop OS) are open source. We also have created a world-class open source framework called Islandora, all with a full-time staff complement of 26 and a systems staff of 4. Encouraging a staff to be fluent with open source tools and philosophies is the best way to transform your library.

(archived webinar and slides)

Third of a three-part series of webinars on open source library systems sponsored by Infopeople Califa, and the Open Source Library Consortium.  The goal of the webinar was to share information about free and open source software that extends the capabilities of the library’s current ILS, whether it is an open source system like Koha or Evergreen or a proprietary system like Millennium, CARL, or Horizon.    The webinar focused primarily on discovery interface and metasearch products.

kcsl.org

2009-current. Assisting KCLS in implementation of IMLS grant entitled Empowered By Open Source. The goal of the project is “create and develop the critical infrastructure components that have traditionally been provided by ILS vendors and establish a peer-to-peer support model for open source libraries.”

The Equinox Promise: An Open Letter to the Evergreen Community

We at Equinox Software feel it is timely to share an evolving document we call the Equinox Promise.

We invite engagement and feedback from everyone, and encourage other vendors to come up with similar statements, or join in on ours.

The Equinox Promise

In 2007, Equinox Software was founded by a group of dedicated people who believe that open source software offers libraries unheralded opportunities to engage in the process of designing the tools they use.

A software company can never speak for the open source communities it serves. But we at Equinox believe we owe our communities a clear statement of our commitments to everyone associated with the Evergreen open source project—whether you are customers of Equinox, Evergreen community members, affiliated vendors, or those who support and champion open source development.

We believe in a transparent, open software development process, and we promise to do everything we can to maintain and improve transparency in every part of that process.

We believe Evergreen code belongs to the Evergreen community, and we promise to continue to expeditiously release all code to publicly-available repositories.

We believe in one single set of code that in the spirit and letter of open source software is free for everyone to download, use, and modify, and we promise that in concert with the community and other development partners, we will work hard to maintain that single code set.

We believe we have a responsibility to the Evergreen community to help keep Evergreen open in every way, and we promise we will never agree to hide code we can share.

We believe that Evergreen deserves community-based stewardship through foundations, user groups, interest groups, conferences, and similar activities, and we promise to encourage that stewardship in every way we can.

We believe that the community is the true voice of Evergreen, and we promise to listen and to share, and to help build and maintain the tools that enable this communication.

via The Equinox Promise: An Open Letter to the Evergreen Community « Equinox Blog.

This announcement from Liblime officially established a forked version of Koha (or possibly two versions: see their new “budget-friendly ILS for Small Libraries”).  This is a sad day for the larger Koha development community. Rather than working together to improve Koha, Liblime will be developing their own version.  Granted, the Liblime version will also be released under an Open Source license but it won’t necessarily work nicely with the ‘other Koha.’   That means less developers available to each product.  And we already have too few developers.  Sigh.

Just finished doing a webinar with Infopeople called Open Source Library Systems: Free is Just the Tip of the Iceberg. Lots of interest and some great questions that indicate people are really checking into the open source options for their library system.

The archive of the webinar as well as the slides are available on the Infopeople site.

On a side note…I use the acronym OSLS to distinguish between open source library system software and the proprietary integrated library system software currently used by most libraries (commonly referred to as an ILS). Someone in the webinar today complained that this new OSLS was unnecessary. I beg to differ.

While it is true that the current open source library software products are indeed integrated library systems (ILS) of an open source nature (OS), it is also true that I have the job of often talking about the difference between the commercial, proprietary ILS products versus the open source ILS products available. Rather than continually saying “Evergreen and Koha this” and “Evergreen and Koha that,” it makes life a lot easier to say OSLS when something I’m saying applies to both of them. I supposed I could have made up the acronym OSILS or OS-ILS but somehow that didn’t seem right. That makes it sound like they are some modified version of an ILS. In fact, an OSLS is a different beast from an ILS. It isn’t “integrated” in the same way that most ILS products are — as in locked together and locked down. So, I’m happy to dump the “integrated” part and leave it clean and simple and clearly distinguished from the ILS of yesteryear.

So, the webinar is about open source in general and what it means to have an OSLS versus an ILS.

plsinfo.org

2009-current. Helped establish and currently managing the Open Source Open Libraries Consortium in cooperation with Peninsula Library System and Califa. The goal of the consortia is to “empower libraries and library consortia by encouraging participation and collaboration in software products generally, and encouraging them to consider an Open Source Library System such as Koha or Evergreen.”

(archived webinar and slides)

Second of a three-part series of webinars on open source library systems sponsored by Infopeople Califa, and the Open Source Library Consortium.  The goal of the webinar was to help libraries understand why involving your organization in an OSLS project creates opportunities for delivering new services to customers and optimizing the work of your staff.

(archived webinar and slides)

First of a three-part series of webinars on open source library systems sponsored by Infopeople Califa, and the Open Source Library Consortium. The goal of this webinar was to help clarify the differences between the proprietary ILS model and the new OSLS model, including what it means for the library staff and budget.