Edited to fix the paragraph beginning “My point is, the vendors..,” as I had left some words out, making the meaning the opposite of what I intended. Oops.

In The problem with the “ILS Bill of Rights”, Dan Chudnov takes ILS complainers (like me, I suppose, though his title refers back to John Blyberg’s ILS Customer Bill of Rights) to task for complaining about products from the major vendors when there is an open source ILS available in Evergreen. An excerpt:

These are our options:

  • Buy a system. Negotiate the best terms you can. Enforce contracts.
  • Buy a system. Live with it, happy or no.
  • Hire people to build you a system. Negotiate the best terms you can. Enforce contracts.
  • Hire people to build you a system. Live with it, happy or no.
  • Install something Free-as-in-Speech. Negotiate support as best you can and enforce contracts.
  • Install something Free-as-in-Speech. Live with it, happy or no.

That’s it. Those are the options.

“A-List”-In-Our-Dinky-Subculture-BiblioBloggers May Kvetch Daily but an entire marketful of suppliers used to clients who accept subpar products and who don’t play hardball and who don’t sue over breaches of contract is not going to suddenly implement your favorite APIs overnight

I think I understand where he is coming from. But I think the disconnect for me comes a bit earlier in his post when Chudnov writes “you can choose NOT TO BUY THE FREAKIN’ PRODUCT.”

Well, no we can’t. I sure can’t. I can’t go in and cancel my library’s contract with our vendor. I didn’t sign the original contract, and neither did my director. That decision was made at least one director ago.

And even if I could move my library over to Evergreen tomorrow I wouldn’t because I am fairly certain that such a move would torpedo my library’s participation in our state-wide lending network, which is absolutely vital to our college’s population. Which isn’t to say that Evergreen couldn’t handle such a network, as it is being developed for Georgia’s statewide library network, PINES; it just means that I’d have a whole heck of a lot of people to convince that this was a good idea.

My point is, the vendors have many of us effectively locked in. And I would hope that the options would be more than simply (a) go open source or (b) take whatever the ILS vendor dishes out.

For my part, I’d like to see librarians come together on what we really want from vendors–not feature after feature, but what environment do we want to work with. For example, I’d like to see us not ask for things like “please let us rearrange the order of the buttons on the screen,” but instead ask for valid (X)HTML/CSS templates for every screen of the OPAC with semantic markup and no presentational cruft in the HTML (no <br/> tags, no inline styles, use a <ul> when marking up a list, etc.). No doubt there are more important things to ask for on the database end, but my experience is with the web design part.

In the meantime, what? For my part, I plan to keep up with ideas and discussions about the future of the catalog on NGC4lib; keep working on the catalog I have to try and make it work better for our college; try to remember to watch my language and remember my audience, because saying that things “suck” isn’t always the best way to get taken seriously; keep up with open source developments like Evergreen and talk them up whenever possible; and try and keep the pressure on my ILS vendor for meaningful change along the lines of, yes, the ILS Bill of Rights.

Note: I had the stub of a post in my long queue entitled “DChud is the man”; seems like a good time to dust it off and post it. So here is a bonus post:

DChud is the man

I admit that most of the time I have no idea what Dan Chudnov is talking about at One Big Library. I don’t really understand the significance of his projects unalog or unapi (though I plan to spend a little more time trying to understand soon).

But when Chudnov (or “dchud” as he calls himself) writes about the big picture, I tend to read and re-read his posts. If you haven’t read his blog, take a look at these posts:

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