Perceptions 2007: An International Survey of Library Automation contains the results of a survey conducted by Marshall Breeding. He explored the relationship between libraries and their Integrated Library Systems (ILS).
The results are interesting. Without going into my own views of the two systems I have worked with, I feel that some libraries just don’t know how they have it – both good and bad. I would like to see statistics from those who have worked with more than one ILS within the past five years, because I suspect that some of the rankings might change dramatically.
That said, it is very good to see a snapshot of people’s satisfaction levels of their software and the companies that support it. This may well reflect how well companies (and ILSs) will do in the next 5 years or so.
One surprise, sort of, is the low level of interest in Open Source ILS. Part of this is due to fact that Open Source ILS is just really beginning to be used in the United States – as more libraries use the systems over time, we will have a better understanding of the satisfaction they have (or won’t have) with them.
The other part goes back to not knowing what we are missing. For instance, I have worked with database reporting with both Voyager and Millennium, and Voyager is by far the most powerful and useful, as you are able to extract data from the Oracle DB directly into Microsoft Access and manipulate it with any SQL you can create. Millennium has a built in extracter, and I have discovered that it saves a great deal of time and headaches to simply export large chunks of data into a text file, then import it into Access and work on it there.
(note: Millennium has a pricey add-on that adds an Oracle database to their system to enable this; I don’t have it at my current place of work, and cannot judge how well it handles the type of queries and reporting I am discussing)
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