Will a bad economy be good for Open Source in Libraries?
George Duimovich over at his parser librarian blog has an interesting blog post about how he feels the current economic situation will be good for Open Source in libraries. It is an interesting proposition, but one I am not 100% confident about. While I agree with the concept that in the long term Open Source is cheaper, it usally isn’t cheaper to switch to Open Source right away. There are staff costs, training costs, new hardware to purchase, and other switching costs. Not to mention you may need to continue to pay support for your legacy system at the same time.
With that in mind, I am not sure we will see many libraries switching to a Open Source ILS in the immediate time frame based on the economy – especially self-hosting/maintaining an Open Source ILS. There may very well be opportunities for firms such as LibLime or Equinox if the can offer a lower price point than the proprietary vendors and can spread the implementation costs out for the length of the initial contract (say for five years).
Where I do think George may be right is for new projects. For example, if a library wants a new discovery layer in a tight budget climate I think there is an increased opportunity to sell the higher ups on self-maintaining an open source solution such as LibraryFind, VuFind, or Blacklight. Same can be said for Open Source digital library projects.
I guess time might tell of George is right, but hopefully the economic situation is just a blip on the radar screen and the economy will turn around and library budgets will return. At that point I can see libraries that had to cut back in some areas really looking at how they want to do things in the future which might mean higher more technical staff to support Open Source projects.