ILS Vendors and Librarians Grapple with Their Relationship

The self-proclaimed Library 2 Gang, a cadre of librarians and vendors consisting of John Blyberg, head of technology and digital initiatives at Darien Library, CT, and Care Affiliates president Carl Grant, who has had a long career at various ILS vendors, among others, in December joined Roy Tennant, OCLC's senior program manager of programs and research and (LJ blogger), for a lively—sometimes heated—formal podcast discussion of his “Library Software Manifesto” released in November.

Tennant said the manifesto was “an attempt to rationalize the relationship between libraries and library systems vendors, which is presently unhealthy.” How it is unhealthy was the focus of the podcast, with both sides presenting their respective points of view. The other participants were the rest of the Library 2 Gang: Jonathan Rochkind, web services software engineer in the systems department at John Hopkins University Libraries; Rob Styles, program manager of data services, Talis; and Richard Wallis, technology evangelist, Talis.

Representing the vendor perspective, Grant said that Tennant's manifesto is “a very important step in trying to bring together under the professional umbrella of librarianship a greater understanding of what is happening between library vendors and libraries trying to use these products,” with both sides needing to increase their awareness of the variables at play.

“This has become a very complex industry, facing a lot of competition from new sources,” Grant said. “We have to step back and say course correction needed here.” He added that “if we can come out with a better understanding on both sides of the table, we're all going to benefit. It seems we're not all on the same side of the table, but we are. We're all in this profession of librarianship, and we need libraries to succeed for the vendors to succeed. We've got to make sure it works for all of us.”

Along with the new competition, Grant also cited the “consolidation in the industry brought about by outside players,” pondering whether the corporate investors gobbling up many of the LIS vendors “understand the marketplace and what libraries need.”

From the librarian perspective, Rochkind contends that “at the root of a lot of this is the failure of any of the parties involved to think strategically about the big picture of where the software is going.”

“Libraries as customers until recently have left that to the vendors,” he said. Librarians also have to think about the market conditions that led to what Tennant refers to as an unhealthy relationship. “If we understand [those conditions], we can get out of them.”

Darien's Blyberg asserts that “as libraries, our relationship with ILS vendors is the most important technical relationship we have. We need to be approaching it from the point of view of software partners. How do we manage this relationship?”

Grant insisted that vendors do grasp that libraries are under budget pressure, but, he said, that doesn't change the basics: “libraries have to understand what it costs to put leading-edge stuff out there,” and libraries either have to adopt a different business model, like open source, “or have to be willing to come up with money to make it happen, or vendors will have to cut costs.”

Grant said services and development for existing products have waned and “become quite bad in many cases,” yet librarians continue to expect vendors to enhance older products and invent and deliver new ones. There's a real conflict in this, as one panelist stated, since “customers feel that they're paying an awful lot, and vendors don't feel we're paying much.”

Taking the middle ground, Rochkind pointed out that, “like patrons, librarians don't always know what they want, so vendors should tell them that certain products won't solve their problems.”

The discussion gravitated toward open source and specifically the Georgia PINES project, prompting Tennant to say that even open source users have vendor relationships that need to be managed. Grant believes that the open source model is so different it's going to yield more satisfactory solutions to problems.

“Proprietary vendors,” said Grant “are stuck trying to grow in a very controlled market without the numbers to support the business model the investors have. I don't see that situation improving. We're either going to see more consolidation happening or vendors failing and disappearing...challenges that the open source model won't face for a long time.”