I wrote yesterday of Nicole Engard’s comment that the ILS was about as open and flexible as a brick wall. Today I learned that the vendor of that ILS had tried to squash her public criticism.
Not cool.
It’s pure speculation on my part, but what comes next? Surely no vendor would send Vinny over to bust an uppity biblioblogger’s knee-caps, but might they offer a customer a better deal if they could just help quiet down a critic within the customer’s organization?
Not speculation: how do we feel about vendors that will spend lavish sums of money to court potential customers, but do little to improve the product and regularly refuse suggestions that they open a round-table with technology leaders among their existing client-base?
John Blyberg’s ILS Customer Bill-of-Rights is especially relevant here, but also, let’s think about our side of the relationship.
update: I keep forgetting to link to this public example of how bad our OPACs/ILSs are. Thanks go to David Walker for making me ROTFL.
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[...] June 14 - Squashing Criticism vs. Improving Products - Casey Bisson reacts to Nicole’s Post and follows up on his previous post, The ILS Brick Wall. I didn’t read Nicole’s June 1 post the same way as Casey–that is to say that I don’t see any indication that III was squashing criticism directed at them. They may be upset, but that doesn’t, in my mind, seem to indicate that III was trying to silence anyone. I mention this because if we (mis)interperate what III does or says and take it at anything but face-value, we run the risk of alienating them which is not at all productive. I have a suspicion that they’re already starting to feel a little like the family stone. The very fact that someone at III is reading blogs like Nicole’s is actually heartening to me since there’s been little evidence to suggest they’re even aware of a librarian’s blogosphere. [...]
[...] Just a few different things I wanted to post about:@ cplWe rolled out a couple minor new features this week in our website and opac.Hot Titles - We have a new list of our top 20 most popular books (including an RSS feed naturally). This list is based on the number of holds on books. I stole the idea from John Blyberg and he was kind enough to provide me with feedback on the process. Thanks John!IMDB Links - We are now linking new dvds we catalogue to their records in the Internet Movie Database so patrons can easily get more info about movies we have. For an example, try this dvd entry.what is going on in georgia?Michael Stephens posted on the Gwinnett library board’s firing their library director. Even after reading the background material, I still don’t have a clear picture of what is going on here. It all seems very surreal.amazon as opacThanks to Casey for alerting me on this one. David Walker has used Amazon’s API to let us all experience what Amazon would be like if it used the frontend of a certain nameless ILS vendor’s opac. Damn that’s ugly! (and funny) [...]
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