[Web4lib] RE: Open source support models

[Caitlin Nelson]

Hi All,

Sorry if my emails seem naive or unstructured - I never meant to make a
point-by-point argument or say anything stunningly original, I was just
voicing a thought on a recent experience...  If you're still interested here
are some more thoughts:

Thomas Dowling wrote:
> I don't understand: are you saying there are commercial alternatives
> where the cost of software plus the cost of support is affordable in
> your situation, but free software plus Liblime support is not affordable?

Just to clarify: no, I wasn't saying that - I was just complaining :)  Of
course everything costs money (or time, or both) in the end.  It might make
a difference, though, if you have IT staff who are more familiar with one or
the other - our in-house IT staff does not support Linux at all.

Marcie Pierson wrote:
>Perhaps what she is saying is that, larger systems often have a person or
entire staff
>dedicated to IT/ILS, whether they use open source or not. Small systems
usually have to
>have one person become the IT/ILS guru on their own, and while open source
may have
>online groups that are happy to assist with troubleshooting and such, that
library person still
>has to do a lot of self-training. Regardless of cost/no cost, on top of
normal library duties, a
>staff member working in a small library has to also become an expert in
some piece(s) of
>software without the benefit of support from another department (or
person).

This is more along the lines of what I was intending to say, thanks Marcie!


Essentially here's the situation: our current "ILS" is a couple of wicker
baskets, some quarter-sheets of paper (check-out slips), and an aging Excel
list of inventory.  Our annual budgets is around $3500 (in a good year).
ANY system plus support is going to cost us money - probably more than we
can afford.  We have no IT person for the library, though we do have someone
for the entire school; I am the only librarian.  What I was hoping was that
an Open Source ILS would work for us, given that there was a chance I could
install it and get it running myself for free (in terms of just money).

What I ended up figuring out was that the time investment and learning curve
for installation and setup are huge obstacles to achieving this goal.  Like
I said in my previous post: I'm decent enough with computers and I like
learning how to do new kinds of work.  But I was not familiar enough with
command-line work, Linux environment, PERL, etc to be able to troubleshoot
or do anything that wasn't already written in the installation guide.  I
also got fed up with installation guides and error messages that said
something like "Have your systems administrator check this" - I AM the
systems administrator in this case!

On the plus side, the VMWare images were incredibly helpful (thanks Dan)
both for Koha and Evergreen, and a great starting place for us.  It takes
off the burden of having to do a complete install from scratch and I can
jump straight in to working with the actual ILS.  And, having gone through
the work of installing from scratch, I am now a more capable administrator
(becoming more so by the hour, I hope).

I thought I and my library would be a perfect combination for using an Open
Source ILS, but in the end I was surprised at how unaccessible it turned out
to be.  Maybe it was only a surprise to me (I should have read this list
more carefully)!  But it did leave me thinking about who exactly is supposed
to be able to use this kind of software.  Some final thoughts for you all:

- Who is the market for Open Source ILSs like Koha or Evergreen?
- If there is no clear benefit in terms of money (since instead you end up
paying for support anyway, or losing that money in terms of time) what is
the advantage of choosing Open Source over commercial software?
- What solution is there for small libraries who cannot afford support for
either Open Source or commerial systems?
- It seems like there is a fairly steep tech gap between moving from a
double-click installation process on Windows to the installation process for
something like Koha on Linux - is there a way to overcome this or is it
something people will just have to "deal with"?

Thanks,

Caitlin Nelson
Interim Librarian
TransPacific Hawaii College
Honolulu, HI