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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by qadmon_rss and kaorunokimi. kaorunokimi said: An ILS lawsuit? I'd sooo like to file one. http://bit.ly/QNhu3 [...]

Is it wrong for me to be excited about this? It is, isn’t it.

No, I think it’s normal to be excited about it. From what I have heard in the past, big ILS vendors [I've heard iii mentioned a lot] play hardball with libraries — and keep in mind that’s the public’s money — over stuff that is only quasi-legally enforceable and gives them substandard service and products that seem decades older than they really are. There has been very little effort to try to make ILSes into anything that approaches what libraries actually want (reliable, with data you can get out and features you can build on yourself) and a whole lot of effort and marketing into feelgood spokespeople and feature creep without improving the core product. I’m just happy there’s a library that was big enough to call them on their antics.

Oh man. To say I am unsurprised by this would be a giant honking lie. I shall be watching this with interest, oh yes!

Steve, it’s not wrong at all. They are a terrible, terrible company – awful to both employees and (more importantly) customers. I hope they sue them out of existence.

Excellent. *polishes pitchfork*

So when they get sued into oblivion, what happens to my local public library’s catalog? They run it for a while as-is (unsupported) until they manage to hire the staff to maintain an open-source catalog? Or they are forced to go running into the arms of III (who has a better product, but a reputation for insane pricing)?

Steve: It’s not an either-or scenario. You also have the option of engaging with a support vendor for an open-source system, who can do everything from just giving you casual support, if you need it, to a full migration + hosted service. Both Koha and Evergreen have commercial support options; for example, Koha has vendors like Bywater Solutions, Catalyst, and PTFS, and Evergreen has vendors like Equinox, Bywater Solutions (again!), and PTFS-Europe. We have a support contract with Equinox, for example, and it’s really refreshing to see a company respond quickly and authoritatively to a support request.

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I’m not a big fan of the current Sirsi company management, but this is unfair:

There has been very little effort to try to make ILSes into anything that approaches what libraries actually want (reliable, with data you can get out and features you can build on yourself)

Sirsi Unicorn (or Symphony, as they renamed it to appease Dynix customers) is extremely reliable at the core, you can get your data out and you can change stuff and build on features yourself. It just takes a lot of unix knowledge to do so. And a lot of time. And institutional support. All of which are in short supply in public libraries.

That ILS software feels 20 years out of date is fair. Of course it does. The core of Unicorn is 20 years old, and other vendors aren’t doing any better. The problem that Queens Borough has with Sirsi is with sales and marketing, not with the software.

It’d be great if the open source ILSes force the traditional ILS vendors into improving, but the ILS market is a lot broader, with needs that vary far more than most people realize. The library in Buckland, MA has very different needs than the library at the World Bank.

I get what you’re saying Lissa — but I think until there’s some sort of a simple export for data it’s fair to say that this isn’t really a feature that the ILS offers. I’ll concede I may have been hyperbolic on the reliability factor, but not having a big red EXPORT button seems to be more of a case of ill-intent than the fact that this isn’t a feature libraries have been clamoring for for decades. It’s like, to me, cable TV. If there really were a market-driven set of economic factors affecting cable tv, we’d all have a la carte pricing. We don’t and I think it’s more because it affects the cable companies’ bottom line, not that it’s difficult or even expensive to provide this option.

That said, yeah QBPL is mostly arguing that claims were made that were not followed through on, so it will be interesting to see how that goes in its own right.

I have to ask what you want this “big red EXPORT button” to do? Our library is in the process of migrating to a new ILS and I haven’t had any trouble exporting anything (currently on Horizon). I didn’t have much difficulty exporting when I was on Unicorn (though I did have API training).

The problem is often importing on the other side and doing the scripting work necessary to put it into a format that the new vendor (or open source software) can make use of. As well, the problem can be that you often need detailed knowledge of your underlying data structure to extract your data properly.

I’d question whether data extraction (and importation) can ever be easy since only bibliographic records have a true standard.

Well, there is a big red export button for bibliographic data, the MARC Export Wizard. On the Util toolbar, been there for at least 8 versions. Getting patron data out requires API training (and then it is trivial).

I do think you’ve hit the hammer on the head with the pricing issue, though. Libraries just don’t have enough money to sling around to get what we all claim we want. That, or we’re all willing to settle.

People talk about III, which stuffs its data into a proprietary format. Unicorn doesn’t. It uses Oracle or CISAM. Both are well-documented. Sirsi doesn’t get credit for this, and they should. It is a very unixish system.

It will be interesting to see what happens. I just wish the case had been filed by someone with a stronger case, better lawyers and without a terminal case of St. Dynix Syndrome.

there is a very simple and reliable “export” button in sirsidynix’s online “director’s station.” it’s not as powerful as API, but it’s a lot easier to use. it is also a very expensive “add-on.”

Having never actually used Dynix products as a librarian, I can’t speak for how good or bad the product is. Queens seems to think that the ILS can do everything but sing “God bless America”.

From what I heard Dynix wasn’t that great. Someone at Queens should have checked references and listservs before signing. My boss says that he would send anyone asking for Dynix references his Dynix problem file (all 275 pages).

I knew when I heard the news of the merger that the Dynix software was going to disappear. If it was that obvious to me, a reference librarian from Montana, it should have been obvious to all those high powered librarians in New York.

Seriously – Where does the catalog live? Thankfully, your father has a wonderful guide to help him navigate the library but what about other patrons?

I have conversations like this with depressing regularity with non-librarians about our catalogs. Particularly for the public catalogs they use they tend to get frustrated with the interface. The most common complaints:

1) Highly popular, circulated, and talked about books don’t seem to float up. Imagine if we harvested popular words of the day out of several sources and included that in our rankins. (And also as some sort of side-bar…ie articles online that mention this resource).

2) If they put in a title, it doesn’t come up to the top.

3) Series, especially in public libraries, seem to be horribly treated. Popular series might be ok, but the person looking for volume 4 of “The Jedi TwiddleTwinkie Wars” may end up having a hard time. How about when viewing a book in the series, there’s information describing it’s place in the series and has links to the other books in the series elsewhere on the page….

4) Similar to above, finding out what books an author wrote and the original publication history of those books is frustrating. Is book x one of their early ones, or is it just the 20th year anniversary printing?

5) Where’s the Sexy Vampire Hunter subject? Mechs? How can it be that searching for subject words and Cooking doesn’t get any results?

Awesome. Forwarding this post to several at my library.

Your dad can (or at least, should) make a fortune doing usability testing.

I’m sure people reading this will assume I’m on the defensive. I hope that’s not the case.

We regularly survey our patrons to get a feel for where they need help in using the catalog and try to make changes within the limits of the software. The people we are surveying are probably not first time users of the catalog, so they know to select just their library, subject, etc. We also know people don’t use the online help, though it’s available. I’m sure when people use Amazon for the first time, they need to look around and see they can actually add a tag. But Amazon’s job is to sell. Though it sounds like the library your father got his card at was short-handed (big surprise these days), I’m sure they would have been happy to assist him over the phone, as you did.

Some of the other issues you point out are actually ones that we’re addressing in our upcoming SOPAC implementation. We will be able to sort by popularity, search by series, tags, etc. Hopefully make it a much more intuitive experience. Increasing the text size on a page is going to be a button. We already put in a third-party spell-checker.

Our intent is to make the use experience as intuitive as possible and are actively working toward that goal.

If http://www.sailsinc.org/ is the site we are talking about, the fonts are criminally small.

Laurie, you probably know this, and I don’t want to lecture, but I think surveys of “what do you want the catalog to do” are very different from usability testing where you give people tasks and see what they actually do and where they have problems.

I’m not unsympathetic, having spent plenty of time in the past banging my head against a recalcitrant OPAC from the administrator’s side.

Hiya Laurie — I didn’t mean to point fingers. I used the iBistro software at my old library and I think a lot of the presets are not great generally. Good for you for working on getting SOPAC running. You have a huge service area and I bet you’ll be able to get a lot of good data.

That said, some really basic changes like having a search box on the main page, making the fonts bigger (I’m on a mac, maybe that matters) and grouping the links so it’s obvious what is part of the catalog and what is extra SAILS stuff might go a long way to making what you have a lot more usable. Thanks for checking in.

Tom Blake: Ha! You’re right!

This catalog sounds a lot like the one at my public library. And thank god, you /can/ just enter your 14-character patron number once and for all on your own home computer.

A twist on that, though: A few times I have gone to use the public computers in the library — yes, to try to find titles of readalikes and ‘next in series’ via Google because they aren’t available via the library catalog and I haven’t done my research ahead of time — and sometimes I haven’t had my library card with me. The reference librarian has made it clear that I am only allowed one “look-up”, that is, one instance of the librarian looking up my number in the library’s system and writing it down for me on a piece of paper so I can take it 5 feet away, squint at it, and try to type it correctly into the public computer interface. So far, I’ve had two “look-ups,” about 6 months apart. Next time I come in without my card and wonder what other authors I might like, I’m apparently out of luck.

I understand that librarians don’t want to spent their time looking up patrons’ numbers. That does seem wasteful. But there must be a better way to handle this. A few years ago, we could just sign our names on a list in order to use the computers, no number needed.

What I want is one of those more convenient (for me) keychain ID cards but apparently I can’t get one unless I pay $1 for it, because my library card is not up for renewal for another year. New patrons get them now when they sign up. Nice.

this made me laugh and cry. thank you for sharing!

Well if you’re talking about the public SAILS site, the original intent was to point back to the libraries and give our libraries some forms, links & tools they could use for their own sites. We spend most of our time on our staff side of the site, since our member libraries are our real focus.

We finally realized that the public is going to us first, and most libraries are pointing to us, rather than right into the catalog. We never wanted to usurp our libraries connection to their patrons.

Knowing that we’re going to be going to SOPAC we held off on our public redesign, since getting a new public site for SAILS will be part of it, as well as being able to offer some of our libraries a new site as well. A few weeks ago I did a quick and dirty clean up. It used to be even more cluttered.

I’d love to be able to spend more time testing on different browsers, OS’s, etc. but my main focus is our catalog, not our public website. Soon it will be all the same!

Ye gods that’s painfully small font. (WinXP here.) The thing that my sweetie complains about with our library’s online catalog: he can’t get a list of new whatever (fiction, dvds, etc) like what you’d find in the physical library.

It seems like there should be a “persona” in designing this stuff that’s the generally internet-savvy, but not esp library-savvy person. That impatient guy who doesn’t ask for directions? :)

Elaine, I have Win Xp & IE. I don’t use a separate style sheet for Firefox, which I’m guessing you’re using? When I look at several sites in the latest version, they’re all rather small. I have the default be x-small, not a specific size, so people can change it in their browser. I actually don’t see that much of a difference with this site’s size & SAILS.

“I have the default be x-small, not a specific size, so people can change it in their browser.”

I think you should possibly reconsider this. I am not using any special stylesheet and the fonts on the SAILS page are much smaller than the fonts on this website when both are at their default sizes for the website. Compare:

SAILS site
librarian.net

Not everyone knows how to resize fonts in their browser or has the dexterity to do so. Additionally, if they make the font size larger to make this visible for the SAILS site, then they have to make it small again to go back to other sites. The default sizes should pretty much always be medium size fonts so that people have to do a minimum of adjustment to view your site.

M Wms, limiting patrons to one userID lookup sounds a bit draconian to me (I say this as someone who gives patrons their library number sometimes several times a week). Maybe they’re suffering severe staff shortages (more severe than ours)?

I’m really not seeing it as small as in your graphic and I see the fonts for this comment area smaller than the text on the SAILS site – home & at work, and not just my computers. Maybe it’s a Mac thing? Have to play around in an emulator – fun thing for a Friday.

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I am so thrilled you reviewed this book, I read it years ago, for my own enjoyment, and soaked up the gorgeous illustrations for hours. It has inspired me to pick up the others in Niki Daly’s series!