[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] acquisitions redux

[Tara Robertson]

Hi,

This is my perspective in using ACQ since January, mainly through managing
tech services in small academic library. I would not recommend using ACQ at
this point.

For me performance is the main issue. ACQ is dreadfully slow. We are in a
urban centre, with a good ISP, nearby the data centre for our consortium
and things were still brutally slow. The Sitka support folks have a
workaround accessing some of ACQ through a web browser, which improves
things quite a bit. Instead of being very, very, very slow, they are just
slow. This was not a deal breaker for us, as we have a very small
acquisitions budget (~$40k/year). However most of my staff using ACQ were
quite frustrated and cranky. If I had known how poor the performance was I
would've waited until the next fiscal year to use start acquisitions. I
wouldn't recommend using ACQ at this point. I see the potential for ACQ to
be awesome in the future (it's very flexible and will support so many types
of workflows), but right now it isn't.

I've been wary to share my frustrations with ACQ on this list because I
know that there are people who are considering migrating to Evergreen and
that there are likely proprietary ILS vendor reps on this list who are
looking for more fodder to scare their customers away from using Evergreen.
As the software and our community mature we need to foster a culture where
we can communicate frankly and help build the software and community that
we want. In that vein, I'm extremely grateful to the folks who've been
working behind the scenes to flesh out development priorities, functional
requirements, get some cash together to pay for development and to the
developers who seem to be listening:
http://blog.esilibrary.com/2012/07/11/high-speed-2-3-acq-development/

Sitka has excellent documentation for ACQ, but I'm not sure if they are
sharing it beyond their consortium. Perhaps someone from Sitka could share
the link?

Hope this is useful,
Tara

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 7:23 AM, J. Sara Paulk <jsarapaulk-wgrl at gmx.com>wrote:

> Appreciate responses and realize that there is some basic documentation
> out there.  Let me take a different approach.  Those of you who are using
> Acquisitions.  ****
>
> ** **
>
> What decisions did you make when you started that you totally regret  or
> conversely are thrilled with? ****
>
> ** **
>
> What do you wish with all your heart that you had done prior to start
> using the module?****
>
> ** **
>
> What do you wish you had known that you know now?****
>
> ** **
>
> Who do you wish you had involved that you didn’t?****
>
> ** **
>
> What steps is the Evergreen documentation missing or what assumptions does
> it make that it shouldn’t?****
>
> ** **
>
> Any other general words of wisdom for one who may be going into the fray
> are and will be greatly appreciated.  Thanks in advance.****
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
> Respectfully,****
>
> ** **
>
> *J. Sara Paulk*                      Regional Director   Wythe-Grayson
> Regional Library****
>
> P.O. Box 159, Independence, VA  24348     Phone-276-773-3018 / FAX
> 276-773-3289****
>
> http://wythegrayson.lib.va.us                        Email
> jsarapaulk-wgrl at gmx.com ****
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://libmail.georgialibraries.org/pipermail/open-ils-general/attachments/20120718/5c68753d/attachment.htm>