Another blow to the hostages

Just as libraries often treat their users as hostages (by assuming that they have no information or public resource alternative), library vendors are guilty of extraordinarily poor track records in both their product performance and their customer service. After this week’s announcement by SirsiDynix, I have to admit I’m feeling a little victimized. Hopefully this will turn to empowerment soon (in that my library will get a new decision to make and this time I can actually be a part of it), but right now I’m just plumb frustrated.

I’ve known about the abandonment of Horizon for a few days now, but as my library is one of the suckers that was scheduled to begin migration this summer, I wasn’t in a place to talk about it here for the rare possibility that one of my coworkers might read it. Until we have more information about what Rome is and whether or not we will go with it, the announcement has not been made to our staff. I’m not looking forward to the announcement. Given the fact that our staff has been eagerly awaiting the migration to Horizon for a long time now and the fact that our library system has invested a considerable amount of money, preparation, training, and based a tremendous amount of strategic planning and budget requests on Horizion — not Unicorn and certainly not Rome.

Now that this is out all over the internet and blogosphere, I can talk about it.

Not that I have much to say at this point. Except I’m in the ILS market if anyone has any ideas. I wish we could go open source, but I’m concerned with our lack of IT staff. We do not have any programmers on staff and I do not feel confident in my ability to support a fully functioning open source system. Also, our system requires full acquistions and serials management capabilities and I don’t think the open source systems have that functionality at this point.

I’ll keep you posted.