High costs of the ILS
I though that the libraries that I have worked at paid a lot for their Integrated Library System (ILS), however, it may not be as bad as some. I was at a meeting that was discussing ILS issues yesterday and someone from a small college said that their ILS costs them over 40% of the total library budget. She even clarified the total library budget part. I’m assuming she is not including staffing, but still, that is a big chunk of change. I guess I’m glad I’m not dealing with that at a very small institution. These are the places that don’t have the knowledge/funding to hire someone to support their own system, so they are kind of stuck. Even if they went to a different vendor, the prices probably wouldn’t go down much and the staff will all need to be retrained to the new software. With academic libraries increasingly relying on resources outside of the ILS, I’m not sure how sustainable this model will be in the long term. Sure, bigger Universities can support their own ILS, but small locations may be forced to find partners or abandon the full-featured ILS altogether sometime down the road.
Joshua Ferraro said,
January 27, 2007 @ 17:01:47
I see this situation in the public library sector daily. Complete abandonment is certainly one option, but the high costs of an ILS are also causing a shift in the market towards more sustainable solutions such as Koha. Even if a library can’t support an open-source system in-house they can hire a company like LibLime to provide a complete ILS package with no license fee overhead. Ultimately there is no escape from installation, migration, and maintenance costs, but you can at least eliminate license costs with open source.
Edward Corrado said,
January 29, 2007 @ 23:01:12
Yes, Open Source Systems such as Koha are another possible solution. As Josuha mentioned their are costs involved with migrating, but in theory it should be less expensive without the license fees. I would like to see a good study about the costs difference (including staff time involved), but I’d me shocked if an OSS ILS wasn’t less expensive, even after paying for some level of support.
ebyblog » Blog Archive » High Costs for Libraries said,
January 30, 2007 @ 21:01:16
[...] From ecorrado: I was at a meeting that was discussing ILS issues yesterday and someone from a small college said that their ILS costs them over 40% of the total library budget. She even clarified the total library budget part. I’m assuming she is not including staffing, but still, that is a big chunk of change. [...]