Perceptions 2009

The latest of Marshall Breeding’s invaluable Perceptions surveys has just been published.  As you’ll know if you’ve seen the previous 2 years surveys, this looks at the library automation market from the point of view of the library, and is a very useful source to counterbalance the regular announcements made by the LMS suppliers. The supplier which comes out the best is a fairly new company Biblionix, whose system Apollo is marketed at small US public libraries. Perhaps by targetting a customer base with ’similar’ needs they avoid having to spread development and support work as widely as some other suppliers?

From a personal point of view I’m pleased to see Innovative come out as what Breeding calls a strong performer – their average customer satisfaction score comes out as 7.13%, significantly above the other companies which I’d call direct competitors in the UK HE market. In the anonymised comments some customers do mention their high costs and the ‘closed’ nature of the system however. I was sad to see that the low scores for SirsiDynix of the previous 2 years have continued however, and their customers don’t seem much more impressed by their newest system Symphony than they are by the older ‘legacy’ products such as Horizon and Dynix Classic. Unfortunately there weren’t enough replies from Talis libraries to allow direct comparison in the main tables, but the detailed information which Breeding gives shows that while average satisfaction seems relatively high the company still has its issues.

What did surprise me was the relatively low enthusiasm for Open Source. Those libraries which have gone that way themselves seem keen – Breeding describes this as ‘a minority of early adopters voicing strong support’ – but there seems less interest in Open Source than I’d expected, even from those libraries which express dissatisfaction with their current system. Sarah Bartlett on the Panlibus blog wonders if this represents waning interest in Open Source, although it may just be that now it is becoming a genuine alternative that librarians are taking a more realistic attitude? I don’t know how realistic Open Source is for a library with perhaps one Systems Manager unless they use a support company such as PTFS, Biblibre or TTLLP?. Liblime comes under some criticism in the survey, even though I think the responses were probably all in before the news of the recent merger came out(?).  Interestingly those libraries which have installed Koha themselves without Liblime’s assistance rated it better than those who used Liblime, which perhaps represents different attitudes to the system rather than differences in the system itself.  Evergreen, mainly supported by Equinox, came in the middle of the satisfaction ratings.

So what is the state of the market? I’m not sure that the ‘traditional’ LMS can continue in its basic form for much longer, certainly for the academic market, as eresources grow ever more important and our users change their demands, needs and learning styles. Some companies seem more aware of this than others, and it is those who know their customers better who will survive, possibly shown in the success of Biblionix. Hence Marshall Breeding’s survey should be required reading for all LMS suppliers.

PTFS to acquire Liblime

Just heard the news that PTFS is to acquire Liblime. This is quite big news, not just for libraries already using Open Source, but also for the whole LMS sector. Liblime have over 500 libraries in the US, and PTFS’ European office is gradually building up an Open Source LMS customer base in Europe. The established LMS companies have been accused of complacency in the past, but this ought to stir them!

On whether it is good news for the OS LMS sector I’m staying on the fence for the time being. On one hand if it increases the use of OS LMS that can only be a good thing from the point of view of bringing fresh insight and ways of doing things into an LMS market which has become a little stale in some areas. However on the other hand it means that the merged company has a lot of influence over Koha, perhaps more than some people are comfortable with. There was a disagreement last year in the Koha camp about the ownership of the extra work Liblime has put in to create Enterprise Koha, and there was also a little friction with PTFS at one time as well. Hopefully these issues will be managed and Koha will continue to be developed according to user priorities. There are a few more companies emerging to support Koha at the moment such as Bywater Solutions so perhaps the risk is diminishing already.

The other thing that could be interesting is that PTFS are also licensed to support Evergreen. Supporting either Koha and Evergreen need not be exclusive, indeed a bit of cross-fertilisation could be productive. However marketing one over the other might not be such a good thing – the user should be aided to select the system which best meets her/his needs. Hopefully the new company will take this attitude, and in this case I look forward to developments!

Google Scholar and metasearching

Interesting blog from Jonathan Rochkind this morning. Metalib currently has a target for including Google Scholar in metasearches, and as a popular resource I imagine most implementations use it. However some libraries have had problems with it, and when they pursued the problem with Google they found that Google doesn’t allow metasearching and so their controls were cutting off metasearch engines as suspected bots. Ex Libris has now put out an email to customers to make them aware of this, and so the target is now being de-activated. Presumably other metasearch suppliers will have to do the same.

Obviously Ex Libris have to take this course of action so we can’t criticise them, but it is sad that Google isn’t prepared to allow metasearching. Google Scholar has targeted education, but isn’t prepared to embrace the open-ness of the best educational resources.  I appreciate that Search is a competitive market and that metasearch is in a way a competitor, but where libraries are trying to make researchers lives simpler by cutting down the multiple resources they must consult, Google isn’t willing to help in this. Hopefully if enough people point this out they may reconsider their decision.

Higher education funding

There’s an interesting juxtaposition of HE stories on the BBC news website this morning. The Russell Group has responded in the Guardian to government plans to reduce University funding over the next 3 years, pointing out the damage that it will cause to Higher Education in the UK. There’s a dramatic quotation:

“It has taken more than 800 years to create one of the world’s greatest education systems and it looks like it will take just six months to bring it to its knees.”

Compare and contrast that to another article arising from a student survey by a technology firm Olympus. This highights how seriously lack of money is affecting current students. Most are missing lectures to do part-time work to support themselves, and are worried about the longer-term benefit they will get from their degree.

These financial problems are arising from a government which must be regretting stating an intention for 50% of young people to attend Higher Education. While France and Germany are putting more money into their Universities, the UK is instead cutting funding and making it more difficult for students to find time to learn. The UK’s Universities are seen internationally as one of its strengths: cut them and in an increasingly-competitive world the UK loses another of its assets.

E-Books and strange cases

With the Kindle seemingly becoming hot property, and new ebook reader devices appearing on almost a daily basis, Dan D’Agostino has written a thought- provoking blog on how the latest developments may affect libraries. To summarise (apologies to him if  this reflects my interpretation of the article not what he wrote!), he suggests that by getting involved some years back, libraries have gone for the wrong technology path: users want e-books they can download onto their readers not e-books they can only read on a networked PC on campus. Moreover, by restricting our users to usage on a networked PC, the users are only scanning the material rather than reading it.

I have reservations on both points. Firstly, some ebook platforms do allow downloads – I know of Netlibrary and Dawsonera which allow time-limited pdf downloads which are usable on most ebook readers that I’m aware of. Secondly, I doubt that most UK HE undergraduates do more than scan any book, whether paper or electronic. They are looking for the information to fulfill their immediate need, so they grab those few facts (and hopefully don’t plagiarise them!) . Few undergraduates have the time to read books in full and I suspect that this has been true for longer than most academics would want to admit.

However the blog is useful in putting forward that just maybe a new platform is at last emerging (I’m not sure how many false starts it has had!) and that libraries need to do something about it. We need to keep up the pressure on e-book suppliers to allow time-limited downloads. We also need to become the recognised place for information on campus about this technology (if we don’t do this someone else will). I’m not sure I want to get too involved in the details yet: there seem to me to be too many competing formats for both the data and the ebook readers, but maybe that Open University model of issuing each user with the basic study materials for his/her course in electronic format on Day One is getting closer for the rest of us.

Stephen Abrams leaves SirsiDynix

Sad to see SirsiDynix’s  announcement that Stephen Abrams is leaving them. This is backed up by Stephen’s own blog posting where he learn that he’s going to Gale in January. Stephen has had a rocky road recently due to a rather ill-advised paper about open-source, and he does have a tendency to blur the boundaries between his roles as technology evangelist and company VP. Nevertheless I enjoyed talking with him when I was involved in things SD, and his presentations about Web 2, Library 2, and so on are both entertaining and thought-provoking. In his new role I hope we’ve not seen the last of him!

Talis Keystone

I was at the Talis Integration Day yesterday, at Talis‘ new offices (new to me, anyway!). We looked at the issue of integrating the LMS with other institutional systems, and of course at Talis Keystone, their module for facilitating this.

It seemed a very logical long-term path to take, the Babelfish route for the Hitchhikers amongst us. Currently most of us can make use of APIs to link to other systems (eg the student database, the university finance system), but this code then has to be completely rewritten when either system changes. In between the 2 APIs there are often also multiple in-house scripts, which are sometimes ill-documented and fail if their author leaves the institution. By using XML and Web Services, when there is a system change only the translator component of Keystone which handles the conversion to XML has to change. The rest of the system doesn’t need to be rewritten. This makes it much more sustainable and allows re-use of code in multiple places.  Its a much more elegant way of moving forward.

The Talis staff acknowledged that the system itself can only handle half the problem however: getting both partners to an integration exercise to agree to it and to how it would work is not easy. Talis will of course also help with this as part of their business consultancy, but just getting university silos to talk to each other to agree that some data sharing would be beneficial to both sides is not easy, as I know from experience. The fact that their system only provides the glue that binds the 2 systems rather than (necessarily) the end-user interface was also a difficult idea for some people used to working with the LMS itself,  to come to terms with.

The need for integration of business systems is however in my mind a no-brainer. A 21st century University cannot continue to exist as a series of silos that are just connected by a central-heating system. Students are demanding an integrated experience from Universities and don’t have the patience to cope with multiple ways of doing things. No single university business systems product combining LMS, finance, student records, etc is available (and I doubt one could be made to be successfull in all areas) so the best alternative is to integrate them via software, and Talis is unusual in its maket sector for providing a product which does that.

Kindle launched in UK

After a long time waiting, the Amazon Kindle is now available for order on the international market, according to their UK website today. They will be supplied from the US after 19th October.

There’s a very interesting sentence in the advert:

“Our vision for Kindle for Kindle is to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds”.

A very high aim, but I wonder how long it will be before our students are expecting us to populate their Kindles for them?

SirsiDynix in court

As I’m no longer a SirsiDynix customer I’ve avoided thus far any comment on matters Horizon/Unicorn/Symphony. However a lawsuit has arisen in the US which could have interesting implications worldwide, so I’ve broken my own rule.

My reading of the situation is thus: the Queens Borough Public Library in New York needed a new ILS and after an exhaustive evaluation in 2005 of what was currently available and promised, they chose Horizon 8.0. Of course, as we all know Horizon 8.0 was aborted, and Sirsi ‘merged’ with Dynix to form SirsiDynix. They changed product direction, stopped development work on the Horizon platform and instead pushed a ‘new’ system called Symphony, based heavily on Sirsi Unicorn. For a number of reasons, Queens Borough has found Symphony unsuitable for their needs and so has chosen to go to the law courts as they felt the company wasn’t delivering what was promised.

A number of other libraries who were in the same position took other routes: some adopted Symphony and several others abandoned SirsiDynix entirely and went to other LMS vendors.  I believe there are other libraries who still haven’t made a decision. Full details of the complaint are on the invaluable LibraryTechnology site here.

The implications are interesting.

• For it to get to court must mean that Queens Borough and SD were unable to come to agreement, which is serious in view of the expense of legal procedure.
• PR-wise it extends the bad press that SD got from its development path volte-face and stops it becoming old news. This in turn hinders sales as potential customers might prefer not to buy from a company facing complaints from existing customers in court.
• If successfull it also means that SD could face other similar claims from other customers.

Shareholders in SirsiDynix’s parent company will not be happy…..

Uncertainty in the Koha community

There seems to be some unfortunate discord in the Koha community.  As an outside observer I’m not familiar with all the detail, but it seems that Liblime, who support it in the US, have announced that they want to centralise on one development platform, to be called Liblime Enterprise Koha. Some parts of the Koha user community, already concerned about Liblime’s trademarking of the name ‘Koha’,  have expressed concern about this, seeing  it as a development fork. Liblime have said that all their code will remain open-source, but there seems to be some uncertainty about the nature of this.  Very sensibly, Marshall Breeding has proposed a review of the governance of the Koha project to focus more on the libraries than the developers.

As an outside observer it is interesting to watch this from outside. As Breeding points out, the scale of usage had outgrown the development community and needs review. A similar thing happened with Linux and Red Hat some years ago. Hopefully some solution will be found as similar problems are likely to occur with other other Open Source systems.