[WEB4LIB] Re: Do We Still Need Online Catalog Vendors?

[Peter Schlumpf]

Dan Lester wrote:

> PS> Designing any fully functional automated library system is not simple, that is
> PS> true.  Anyone attempting this should be aware of that.  Those who thinks
> PS> otherwise are fooling themselves.  However, that by itself does not mean that
> PS> such a task is necessarily impossible for anyone other than a commercial systems
> PS> vendor.
>
> Nothing is impossible if you have lots of skilled staff and lots of
> money and time.

True.  But I would add that creating sufficiently useful online catalog software, though
difficult is hardly impossible for a group of sufficiently motivated people or even a
lone developer.  Money, though a very useful thing is secondary to motivation, skill and
time to writing useful software.

> Yes, the example that Bill described below is at the high end.  Yes, OCLC
> started out as a relatively small, relatively local system that wasn't
> even online at first (we got catalog cards mailed to us, and ordered
> them by sending in punched cards with LCCNs in them). But even then it
> had a staff of a number of programmers, plus operators, management,
> etc.

True, in the case of OCLC.  However many examples can be cited of eminently useful
software written without the aid of armies of programmers, management, operators, tons
of $$$$ or other such formal structures normally assocated with such endeavours.
Consider the Linux operating system, which began with the work of a single person, Linus
Torvalds, in his spare time.  This has since grown to include the collaborative work of
many people around thew world.  The Apache web server was put together and continues to
be developed by a group of programmers trying to overcome the shortcomings of the
original Mosaic WWW server software.  Perl, the programming language developed by Larry
Wall.  The Squid proxy/cacheing server, just to name a few.  All of these, taken
together, are spawning a whole new software development model.  Any software company
that ignores this phenomenon does so at their peril.

> Well, no, if you can convince your boss that this is a good thing to
> spend your time and his money on.  I'd be surprised if many library
> administrators would go for it, though...at least if they wanted to
> keep their jobs. We all know that tens or hundreds of thousands of
> dollars is a lot of money, but that pales into what you'll pay for a
> development team to develop one system comparable to a commercial
> system of comparable size.

It may take some bootstrapping effort and persistence by individual developers on their
own time to demonstrate that such a thing is possible and desirable.  If the product of
such a bootstrapping effort is good enough, institutions could be convinced  to buy into
such a thing and those who had the resources provide them to develop it further.  Again,
consider the advantages of the end product:  a free and open library system developed by
the library community independent of any one vendor.... library software reduced to a
commodity.  I think such a thing outweighs the cost of development and support.  That
cost can be distributed among many institutions, developers, and yes, library software
vendors too.

> reviews their operations annually....and note how many staff they have
> developing the systems in question.  Even the vendors that develop
> "small systems" (Follett, Winnebago, etc.) have tens of programmers
> continually at work on development and upgrades.  And the basic system
> any of them first came out with wasn't written by one person in his or
> her spare time on the job.

Well, this has already happened in the highly competitive world of operating systems.  I
don't see why the open source development model could not be extended to the automated
library systems marketplace as well.  If anything, considering the high regard that the
library community gives to the values of openness of information and sharing, I think it
would be a perfect fit.

Peter
--
Peter Schlumpf
Information Systems Specialist
North Suburban Library System
schlumpf at nslsilus.org

> cheers
>
> dan