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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Nicole Engard last month posted about The State of our ILS, describing the systems as:

I’d say it’s a like the crazy cousin you have to deal with because he’s family! It doesn’t fit, we are a very open IT environment, we have applications all over that need to talk to each other nicely and the [ILS] is a brick wall preventing us from getting the information we need and sending the information we’d like.

Nicole’s point about interoperability is well put, and the post is part of her preparation for conversation and discussion she hopes will go on at the American Association of Law Libraries annual meeting in July.

Coincidentally, I’ll be at AALL next month. My presentation will focus on the things we can do once we overcome the problems Nicole describes, but my concordance with her point should be clear (see previous posts one, two, three).

Extra: When will people who want to improve things not feel as though the ILS is against them, as in this post by Steve Lawson?

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.

AALL, American Association of Law Libraries, future libraries, ILS, interoperability, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, Nicole Engard, standards, Steve Lawson