DISQUS

Great, well take a minute and fill out the survey then.

Download it from the official site: http://www.greenstone.org/download

Check out some comments on my FriendFeed.

Jill, I'm not sure I understand. In the case of the open source ILS, your vendor is doing product development - and providing general customer service and help desk support. The difference in the open source model from the model libraries are used to is the fact that if they need a feature developed they can ask their vendor to create it for them (for a price) or they can take their idea to a contractor and they can program that piece for them. With your proprietary ILS you get the upgrades that the most people want and if you want something special you don't have access to the code so you can't ever get that feature.

As for the sustainable future, only time will tell - of course I believe it's the way we're moving - but even if you don't - if you're in the market for a new ILS anyway, why not try one where you get complete access to the data and code so that you can always take that with you should you have to move again?

Alex,

Those are some great points. When I go out to teach what open source is I show a wide range of software products to the attendees. Among those products I show Firefox and Thunderbird, both open source and both work once installed.

The problem is that you're talking about installing an operating system without asking for help and the ILS is along that same scale. I'm not saying that you can do it yourself, I'm saying that there is support out there for people without server and programming skills.

Thanks Joe, unfortunately the last time I used Perl was in 2000 - so I think I need a beginner book!

:) Keep the good content coming and I'll keep quoting you :)

Oh geeze !! :)

Why switch?

MJ, thanks for the update! I'll be honest I stink when it comes at hardware, I just figured it was something I shouldn't ignore.

Thank you for taking the time to update us all. For those who were wondering - the link to Jeffrey's note is here.

I know that our company goes out to libraries interested in hearing about open source - just like the larger vendors do. We also offer online demos (with a host).

I'm not sure what else can be done - as you implied - it is harder when your company is smaller than others.

I hadn't seen that yet. But - you've just posted it for me :)

Awesome, thanks for adding a picture :)

It could!! Unfortunately most of our users are on Windows machines still :(

Jern, Koha with Class is still available, but I don't think Koha Zoom is available with it - yet. Keep an eye out for some changes probably after the 3.0 release.

Glen, excuse my ignorance - but I have yet to find anything on the GIMP site that says it's open source - that's the only thing stopping me from including it in my presentation. I had all the others except for Audacity!

You know I never even thought about blogs and wikis!! I wonder why not! Thanks :)

I totally agree - it doesn't even look like a donut!!

Um - I copied the links from the VALE site. Did you try clicking them from there?

No problem - well worth reading :)

Does Drupal offer a way to have a true digital library?

Jill, very true! But I still would have liked to paint my apartment whatever colors I wanted and hung pictures all over and not worried about how my customizations were going against the rules.

Lee, glad to be of service. I know that we can't all be at all conferences so I like to share what I learned.

Thanks - the post has been edited :)