Who Makes These Decisions Anyway?
Brian’s comment at RemainingRelevant should resonate with many of us:
Something to consider about why libraries end up with bad interfaces (at least as far as catalogs go) is that it might be that the people who use the interface (and help the public use it) are not the people who decide which interface to use.
When it comes to demanding better from vendors [...] consortiums like mine seem to place more emphasis on “cheap and reliable” than in “useful to the patrons.”
More than identifying individual vendors, I’d like this to be a discussion about our decision making processes. Let’s look carefully at how we got here — not to point fingers (for we are all responsible), but to plot a path out and try to make sure we never find ourselves here again.
As Karen points out: it’s not enough to nod our heads in a knowing sigh, “the genius moment for you or anyone else will be figuring out what to do with it!”
It’s corny, but I’m serious. If you’ve taken the pledge, you’ll know to look skeptically at every product. You’ll ask yourself and a mix of likely users how it could be better. And you won’t buy anything or renew any contract on anything that sucks. There is no consortium, no institution that can afford to throw away money on products that can’t deliver the ease of use and quality of experience that users expect from competing (and more familiar) tools elsewhere on the internet.
The real challenge, of course, is making sure everybody involved with every decision-making process understands this.
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[...] John Blyberg’s ILS Customer Bill-of-Rights is especially relevant here, but also, let’s think about our side of the relationship. [...]
[...] The rub comes from the fact that many people don’t feel libraries and ILS vendors exist in a free market, and Dchud is hopping mad that those people don’t realize that vendors won’t compete like it’s a free market until their customers start exercising some free-market sensibility (as suggested in his “you can choose NOT TO BUY THE FREAKIN’ PRODUCT” point). [...]
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