[Evergreen-general] ILS Conversion Justification Questions

[Rogan Hamby]

Hi Wendell,

Full disclaimer: I work with Equinox but I'm responding with my community
hat on.  This also went to my spam so I'm hoping that if I respond that
will help boost your message for wider visibility in case it went to spam
for others.

Addressing:  "What I need is justifications/reasons to convert to an open
source ILS from a proprietary system.  What are the advantages, both
theoretical and real world and the potential pitfalls?  Has making such a
conversion saved you time and effort in administration and operation of the
system?"

There is a fair bit of literature out there on this, some of which
specifically addresses Evergreen and the community but my thoughts in
bullet point form are:

* Security.  We have to take on faith that closed source ILSes are securing
the privacy of our patrons.  Because of open source transparency that is
not the case here.
* Support Mobility.  If a given host ends up not working out for you for
some reason it is not hard to move your system to a new support hosting
company, something impossible with closed source without a full migration.
There are real-world examples of this.
* Input on features.  This gets a little fuzzier but input with traditional
vendors on feature sets is based purely on a cost-benefit ratio.  In the
open-source world, even if you aren't directly employing coders there are
ways to contribute to and influence things.

I'm sure there are other things as well but those are off the top of my
head and something to hopefully get discussion rolling.

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 10:35 AM Gragg, Wendell E <WGragg at bryantx.gov>
wrote:

> Hello everyone.  This is my first post here, so if I am posting in the
> wrong place, please feel free to let me know.
>
>
>
> Our library system (3 branches) is considering a move from Polaris to
> Evergreen and we are going to need to jump through a number of hoops in
> this process, beginning with the point of my post, justifying the
> conversion.
>
>
>
> What we are looking at is using a hosted solution due to the fact that our
> city IT department will not allow us to have anything but a Windows based
> server. Currently, we have a production server, telephony server and a test
> server, all running Windows and MS SQL.
>
>
>
> Currently, we have approximately 204k bib records, around 49k patrons and
> an annual circ between 500-600k. Only two of our branches circulate.
>
>
>
> I have received quotes from three companies (Mobius, Equinox and Emerald)
> for hosting and migration services and all three would come well under the
> approximately 40k per year we are paying for Polaris maintenance, so
> financially it would make sense. What I need is justifications/reasons to
> convert to an open source ILS from a proprietary system.  What are the
> advantages, both theoretical and real world and the potential pitfalls?
> Has making such a conversion saved you time and effort in administration
> and operation of the system?
>
>
>
> One of our biggest hurdles in getting this approved is going to be the
> cyber security section of our city IT department.  They are quite
> aggressive and demanding (oh the stories I could tell…), so I will need to
> gather information on that too. Any advice there would be greatly
> appreciated, especially if you can impart any knowledge as to the security
> aspects of Evergreen and/or the hosting providers I mentioned.
>
>
>
> Please feel free to contact me off list if that is your preference.
>
>
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
>
>
> Wendell
>
>
>
> Wendell Gragg, MSIS
>
> Automation Services Supervisor
>
> Bryan+College Station Public Library System
>
> Bryan, TX
>
> 979-209-5613
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Evergreen-general mailing list
> Evergreen-general at list.evergreen-ils.org
> http://list.evergreen-ils.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/evergreen-general
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.evergreen-ils.org/pipermail/evergreen-general/attachments/20201110/6226ed40/attachment.html>