Although open source ILS has been successful in many small to medium sized systems – the Nelsonville Public library being the most noteworthy – the fact remains that a system as large as TPL might be ill equipped to deal with many of the unknown factors. For example, the estimation of the TCO for Koha is approximately $1M. However, this does not take into consideration the many factors, such as: bugs in the source coding, the amount of time needed to debug the software, create patches, or design software updates. Furthermore, an effective ILS would not be complete without a backup ILS. Unfortunately, there is little information to even suggest such a precautionary measure, nor whether the current backup ILS at TPL, PC Reliance, would be compatible with Koha. This recommendation then, is basically a question of sustainability over time. It is common knowledge that the City of
2 comments:
It is true that it would be risky for TPL to venture into open source without considering all the issues it may encounter simply because of their size. But guess what? The beauty of open source is that they can actually try it before committing :)
While I did not review Koha (I reviewed Greenstone instead), I came to similar conclusions.
Open source software models, being so new and different, makes it difficult to entirely predict the consequences of adoption. Like yourself, I also felt that its possible benefits made it worth pursuing further through a pilot project.
I suppose in that way, whether Koha or Greenstone or any other OS library system, the same basic conclusions apply...?
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