The big scandals in libraries tend to happen out in front – somebody looking at porn, somebody else wants to censor a book, maybe a group trying to book a “how to kill yourself” workshop at the library – you know, that kind of stuff.
But there was a minor scandal within the library world recently when a position paper written by Stephen Abram, Vice-President of Innovation at ILS vendor SirsiDynix, was posted to WikiLeaks, a site where whistleblowers can post secret documents. Abram responded to the controversy on his blog yesterday (and continues to respond to comments today which are definitely worth a read.)
The truth is that the paper itself doesn't contain many secrets – it's just the expected arguments from a well-established proprietary vendor against the rise of open source. In fact, if you substituted the words “SirsiDynix” for “Microsoft” and “Evergreen” for “Firefox”, this document probably wouldn't read much differently than some of the material Microsoft has released about their own open source competition.
I'm not an expert but I suspect that Abram is correct that open source ILS's aren't as robust as other open source success stories such as Linux and Firefox in comparison to their more established corporate counterparts. But I also think he's exaggerating some arguments to help make his case and discount open source.
I also think that the pace of improvements in open source software is *very* frightening to anyone who works with a proprietary product – including library ILSs. (I know the Government of Canada has departments using Evergreen, many BC public libraries are moving to Evergreen and almost every library in the State of Georgia involved in an open source consortium using Evergreen.)
I'm not an open source evangelist (not completely anyhow!) but I do believe in the ideas that inform the open source movement – sharing, openness, freely accessible information. (Hmm, remind you of anything else that espouses those values?)
This discussion is especially interesting in light of Saskatchewan's SILS consortium, which, as it goes live over the course of the next year, will bring together 10 library systems consisting of over 300 library branches – maybe the largest consortium of its type in the world (definitely in terms of geographic area if not individual members. Actually I see that Georgia has 280 so we might just be the biggest in terms of number of branches too!)
I think Evergreen (via the vendor, Equinox) was considered early in the process but the decision ultimately came down to a number of established vendors (including SirsiDynix) with Innovative Interfaces winning the contract. It will be interesting to see how quickly Evergreen and open source continues to advance and if the SILS consortium might ever reach a point where they want to migrate to an open source solution. In fact, not to be ageist but I wonder how the decision might've gone if a few more next-gen librarians who tend to be more open to open source (ha!) had been involved in the decision?
(Anyhow, all in all, not a good news month for SirsiDynix any way you look at it.)
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