IMLS Boosts Open Source ILS Project for Large Public Libraries

A million-dollar grant will fund the King County Library System's effort to increase open source ILS adoption

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 10/12/2009

• Open source development aimed at larger library systems
• Migration resources and mentor network to be developed
• Brain trust of open source libraries to provide long-term guidance

For many public libraries considering the switch to an open source integrated library system (ILS), there's often a will but not necessarily a way. To ease the path for larger public library systems, which have so far been more cautious, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a $998,556 (match: $1,014,400) grant to a project titled "Empowered by Open Source."

The grant effort is being spearheaded by the King County Library System (KCLS), Issaquah, WA, and initially will rely both on the library's own experience migrating to the open source Evergreen ILS—an effort already in-progress—and on KCLS's financial investment in that ILS.

Working with KCLS on the "infrastructure components" for the initial phase of the grant are three partner institutions: Peninsula Library System (San Mateo, CA), Orange County Library System (Orlando, FL), and Ann Arbor District Library (MI). At least eight more libraries are expected to join over three years.

Redirected funds
According to Jed Moffitt, KCLS director of Information Technology Services and one of the grant's co-authors, the idea developed out of KCLS's decision to divert the funds that would have gone toward prepping for and migrating to a new proprietary ILS.

Instead, the library will essentially subsidize a large initial development push on the Evergreen codebase for its own needs. Should all work out, this would pay off by allowing other libraries to make the switch more easily, eventually fostering a self-supporting and robust community.

To start, KCLS will thoroughly document its own migration experience in order to help guide other libraries that may go down the same path. "We're trying to approach the problem holistically," Moffitt said, "trying to think of all the elements that public libraries will need to be able to feel comfortable about taking the risk and jumping to an open source platform."

In the end, the grant authors envision the project delivering several components useful to other public libraries considering an open source ILS: a central repository of shared specifications and documents outlining migration requirements (already taking shape at oss4pl.org), and a peer support network that would potentially pair interested libraries with staff from "mentor" institutions.

Hoping to use the opportunity to bolster the broader open source community as well, the authors also included among the project's activities a series of open source advocacy programs and outreach webinars, and the maintenance of an open source "wish list" to shape the course of future development.

Bringing large public libraries into the fold
According to the grant applicant's research, fewer than two percent of public libraries in the country have implemented open source library systems. Of those, the vast majority are smaller systems.

As Moffitt puts it, part of the barrier to entry for large public libraries considering open source so far has been the inability of these relatively new ILS projects to accommodate the heavier demands of a system like KCLS, which ranks among the top in circulation in the country and fills more holds than any other library.

However, the long-term challenge requires cooperation as much as it does development funds and lines of code. As described by Lori Bowen Ayre, founder of the Galecia Group consultants and one of the grant's principal authors, there is a real need to pool the collective experiences of libraries in a "peer to peer support model." Framing the grant's goals in terms of other successful but somewhat disparate Evergreen efforts to date, Ayre said:

"There's Georgia. There's Michigan. There's Indiana. There's [British Columbia]. They've all gone through this independent project for creating infrastructure for themselves, they've all independently invented the wheel. But there isn't one shared place where we can all benefit from what they've done already. We're all in this together—let's consolidate everything we've learned.

Evergreen, for now
Because of the heavy reliance on KCLS's own early experience, the initial stages of the grant will focus largely on development and documentation of Evergreen, but the grant's authors hope the majority of the resources will be platform agnostic.

Matt Carlson, KCLS's Evergreen project coordinator, said that the initial resource specifications developed by the library in consultation with the Galecia Group are so high-level that they don’t necessary apply to any one kind of software. (Many of these can be found among the resources on oss4pl.) The same also goes for governance rules and the assessment of open source community needs, he added.

The larger idea is to allow libraries to reclaim ownership of the software and systems critical to their well-being. Even the project document's terminology is used to distinguish its goals from any analogous vendor-developed products: the term ILS is eschewed, replaced instead by open source library system (OSLS).

Organizational hurdles
Of course, the grant authors "could be guilty of being considered Pollyannaish for being so optimistic,” Moffitt said, adding that they were quite aware of the criticisms being leveled against them.

Some critics say the simple administration of a grand effort like this will quickly become untenable as other participants come on board, and that librarians don't typically have the project management experience to see a project like this through. Others say that the libraries' differing agendas will be the toughest to manage.

Still, aiming to help four larger public libraries each year for the next three years migrate to an open source system, the project partners hope build up a kind of momentum as well as a "brain trust" of partner libraries that will sustain the project beyond its initial funding period.

At the outset, each partner library will dedicate .25 FTE to the project, though the hope is that the support infrastructure will eventually become self-supporting with the addition of input and oversight from other partner libraries as the core group expands.

"It's a pretty basic concept in essence," Moffitt said. "We make it. We do it. We find a friend and pass it on—and so on and so on."

Contact the author: josh.hadro@reedbusiness.com