Why is it so hard to say that some things simply suck? I’ll quote Casey Bisson, quoting himself.
Please, stand with me now and repeat:
“When something sucks I will say so. When vendors spout crap I will call them on it. My staff deserve good tools, my users need good tools, and I can’t afford to buy stuff that sucks.”
Together, we’ll fix the world one product at a time.
Related story: State of our ILS
“It’s a new world and building onto a system that is more than 15 years old isn’t going to cut it anymore – there needs to be a new system, one that allows for more freedom, and it has to come soon, because more and more libraries are going to turn to open-source.“
I am probably not the first to say this, but… I recently completed a course in cataloging and discovered that I hate it. Yet I also completed a course in databases and discovered that I love it. One would think that the two would go hand-in-hand, as they are both concerned with organizing information accessibly.
But then, no: cataloging is designed for a pre-RDBMS world, when there was really no other way to keep track of a book’s location. And, ya know, alphabetical by author would be screwy in such a world. All props to Dewey and Cutter, et al. for attempting to make the library a saner, more accessible place. Yet it can be as user-friendly as a tax code.
Whether libraries turn open source or not, they need to get more in line the relational principles outlined by Codd thirty six years ago. Granted, so should most RDBMS’s. :-)
We do need to put more thought into how we can help our library users get laid. (Speaking metaphorically — in most cases — of course.)