[Web4lib] RE: vendors and usability

[Joshua Ferraro]

On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 03:33:43PM -0400, Bridge, Frank wrote:
> The newly-suggested model--having a library automation vendor design an
> open-ended system so that the local library can then overlay its own
> interface--introduces variables that a library automation vendor could
> not control and whose look and feel could be seriously compromised.
> There are a number of libraries who have the local expertise to
> accomplish this successfully, or to administer a third party vendor to
> do so.  But is there a sufficiently large universe of libraries to
> sustain a market for the vendor investment to develop such a system?
A bit of history:
In 1999 Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand hired Katipo Communications
to develop Koha, a full-featured open-source ILS. Koha is now used in over
60 libraries worldwide almost all of whom pay for support from one of four
vendors (LibLime in North America, Katipo in Australasia, Paul Poulain in 
France and MJ Ray in the UK). So market sustainablity is definitely possible
for 'open-ended' systems.

Interestingly, instead of competing with one another the four vendors
supporting Koha are collaborating together and sharing their development
resources to make the product better (with sponsorship from libraries).

> It is that business opportunity that creates the pressure to design such
> a system, not just our demands for it.
In fact, in many cases, open-source projects have far exceeded their
proprietary counterparts in terms of overall design, usability and 
functionality: Firefox and Apache are two examples. Don't forget the
Yaz toolkit and Zebra, both designed by Index Data ... Yaz powers more
than half of all Z39.50 servers and clients world-wide and is widely
considered to be the leading toolkit for building Z39.50 applications.

I believe the open-source ILS can achieve the same status.

-- 
Joshua Ferraro               VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime                                Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
jmf at liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS