[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Proposed change in Vendor Listing Policy

[Sharp, Chris]

Rogan,

Thanks for your feedback to my questions.  I'll respond in-line:

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rogan Hamby" <rogan.hamby at yclibrary.net>
> I'm only speaking for myself here but I don't think it's necessary
> but nor is the listing itself. It's a nice thing to do as a
> community to help people find resources in a way that's hopefully a
> bit more curated than just heading to Google (or Duck Duck Go or
> whatever). To me if we're going to curate there is a point of
> balance to find between burdensome and providing the value of that
> curation.
> 
> Since the users are going through the listings on an Evergreen
> vendors listing to find their Evergreen services it makes sense to
> me to link through to those services directly. You're correct that
> users could write separate emails and go browsing through each site
> for content but that's a lot more cumbersome than clicking through
> and the purpose of the curated list is convenience to me. If not,
> why are we doing it?

I'm all for usability and the ease of finding information on websites.  We are librarians after all. :-)  The problem I have is that this policy is *requiring* some sort of content change on the vendors site as a condition for being allowed a listing on the vendor page.  Do we have standards for what constitutes a sufficient response to this requirement?  If I'm a vendor and I just copy and paste the information already on the wiki onto a page on my site with a "contact us for details" statement, for instance, would that suffice? 

If we include this as a *suggestion*, not a requirement, I'm totally on board with that.


> One point you brought up I'm not clear on. You ask, " Isn't the onus
> of reviewing such companies on potential customers seeking
> support/development work?" There is nothing in this proposal about
> reviewing the content on the vendor's sites. The accuracy or
> veracity of their claims of what they can support is not covered
> here. There was a similar topic brought up because of a vendor and a
> letter written to the board that we still need to discuss and decide
> how we would handle it as a community but for now that issue was
> lessened in urgency by the vendor themselves taking their site
> offline. If I misunderstood what you're asking let me know.
> 
> 
> I don't see this is as an issue that is particularly intersectional
> to the RFP process. I think a vendor listing page may be used for a
> lot of reasons and one of them maybe to find folks they invite to an
> RFP but there are a lot of scenarios that are much less, well,
> intensive also. And being friendly to that range of uses is
> important I think.

Sorry, I can see that I have conflated two tangentially related issues.  My larger point is that I think we shouldn't make the vendor listing page into more of a problem than it is.  I'm totally fine with vetting the vendor as we allow the posting and doing occasional checks on whether the postings are up-to-date.  Requiring the link back to the project is something I can live with too, since it gives the project more exposure. When we start requiring specific content on vendor websites, however, that feels like we're meddling in details that should be up to each service provider.

-- 
Chris Sharp
PINES System Administrator
Georgia Public Library Service
1800 Century Place, Suite 150
Atlanta, Georgia 30345
(404) 235-7147
csharp at georgialibraries.org
http://pines.georgialibraries.org/