Carl Grant is the President of CARE Affiliates
Grant’s presentation today was the vendor perspective of integrated library systems. He talks about the different kinds of people in the profession, where the problem areas are, where vendors are headed, and solutions to some of the problems.
Librarians have a certain reputation with vendors, but it isn’t as bad as you think. Grant says that librarians have adverse feelings to risk and change, they tend to be conservative because they are spending public funds, they are highly educated yet not adventurous, and usually use an RFP as a buying mechanism. There tends to be different kinds of personalities in libraries. The innovators are those tech enthusiastics who want all the new stuff and are always checking things out, unfortunately they don’t have a lot of money. There are the early adopters who are the revolutionaries, they embrace the new technologies and talk about how to implement them. However, they want the software highly customized. These two groups only make up 20% of the market. Early majority people want things to work efficiently and want to buy from the market leaders. They want safe and reliable software. The late majority are conservative and price sensitive. They are the skeptics, but are demanding. They don’t accept the technology until it is a commodity. The laggards are those who challenge everything and vendors don’t even try to sell to them.
Grant explains what the vendors have to go through during the process. The purchase process tends to be a 2 year process. When libraries send an RFP it costs the vendor about 5000 dollars. Multi-day demon cost another 5000, all these costs are going into the actual cost of the ILS cost. Vendors get about 1/3 of the RFPs they receive and this adds to the cost as well. Many libraries bring in consultants and they are brought in so that the responsibility is placed on someone else.
In many cases, libraries get the lowest common denominator that doesn’t piss anyone off. If you want to be on the edge you have to be daring and lead and choose software research the systems out there. Since there are so many different browsers, and systems and different things it’s hard to get the ILS to keep up to date.
Grant gives us his opinion on where he sees things going in the future. The OPAC will be going away, because there are just too many interfaces. The acquisitions model will also go away, because it will be mainstreamed. Circulation and interlibrary loan will become self-service modules, and users will need to pay for the convenience factor. The cataloging module will morph. Personalization will be added. It will be necessary to standardize workflow and partner with non-library companies.