Leggott Responds to Stephen Abram

In Mark Leggott's lengthy response to Stephen Abram's article, he challenges many of Abram's claims and does so from his own  relevant experience:  Leggott is from the University of Prince Edward Island which migrated off SirsiDynix Unicorn to Evergreen.

The following four issues (fears) often come up for people when they first start looking into an OSLS (open source library system):

1. Total Cost of Ownership (Don't  OSLS products really cost more by the time you hire the staff you need to run them?)
2. Features (I understand OSLS products don't have all the features of a mature ILS product.)
3. User Friendliness (An open source system will be too hard for our customers to use.)
4. Difficult to Deploy (There's no way our staff could install and implement an open source ILS on their own!)

The following four excerpts address these issues very effectively.   I hope you'll read the entire Leggott article but in case you don't, at least read these excerpts!

Abram: The open source proponents state that it has a much lower price and a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO). What they tend to leave out, however, are the entry costs of switching systems.

Leggott:  Open source does (in my experience) have a much lower TCO. As one example, UPEI moved from the SD Unicorn ILS to Evergreen in just over 2 months, including buying new hardware, hiring a contractor and acquiring a 1-year Equinox platinum support agreement for LESS than what we paid for a year's maintenance for Unicorn. With what was left over we paid developers to add some functionality to Evergreen, some of which found its way back to the project. That kind of giving back to the community feature of open source is hard to assign a value to, but it is many times greater than the effort you typically put into a closed proprietary system, further enhancing the TCO of open source.

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Abram: Generally, the available open source ILS platforms have less than half of the features and functions of any SirsiDynix ILS.

Leggott: The great benefit of open source products is that they are part of a rich and vibrant ecosystem where you are free to mix and match products to suit your local needs. While the current Evergreen does not have the same full functionality as the flavour-of-the-month-SD ILS (e.g. no serials management), UPEI was able to construct a BETTER for us ILS ecosystem by using the CUFTS open source system to manage all our serials - print and digital. This would be a challenge, or downright impossible, with a system like Unicorn. The Library community does not need more closed ILS systems, we need more OLAFs - Open Library Applications Frameworks. A better way to make this statement would be "The available open source ILS frameworks will always have more features and functions than any SD ILS."

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Abram:  Proprietary software is much more user-friendly.

Leggott:  Hmmm. One of the most interesting outcomes of our switch from Unicorn to Evergreen was the comments our student assistants made when they came back from summer break and discovered a new ILS: This software is a lot easier to use. Our staff training with Evergreen also took a fraction of the time it did with the switch to Unicorn.

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Abram: Is open source harder to deploy?

Leggott:  No. Our implementation of Evergreen took a fraction of the time that Unicorn did at UPEI. Also, because we are proactively investing staff time and money in more useful open source/LAMP type skills, our staff can easily install most open source software stacks, giving us a great deal of flexibility. At UPEI all our current software applications (with the exception of RefWorks and desktop OS) are open source. We also have created a world-class open source framework called Islandora, all with a full-time staff complement of 26 and a systems staff of 4. Encouraging a staff to be fluent with open source tools and philosophies is the best way to transform your library.