Library Revolution

Roy Tenant has posted his Library Software Manifesto, which is an excellent document for all of us to review.

In my line of work, I hear a lot of complaints about ILS vendors and what they should be doing for us. What I think is really important about Roy’s manifesto is that it reminds us that we have responsibilities, too, when it comes to working with software vendors to provide our customers with the service they deserve.

Pay special attention to the points Roy raises about our responsibilities as consumers:

Consumer Responsiblities

• I have a responsibility to know the needs of my users.
• I have a responsibility to put the needs of my users before my own.
• I have a responsibility to communicate my needs clearly and specifically.
• I have a responsibility to verify that the enhancement requests I make are really what I want.
• I have a responsibility to assign enhancement priorities fairly. — Not every enhancement request can be top priority.
• I have a responsibility to realize I’m not special. — Therefore we should try to come to agreement on how to do the same things so we can minimize the investment in writing software to help us do it.
• I have a responsibility to select software using a fair and reasonable process. — Specifically, can we all agree to stop the pain of the RFP process? Please?
• I have a responsibility to report reproducible bugs in a way as to facilitate reproducing them.
• I have a responsibility to report irreproducible bugs with as much detail as I can provide.
• I have a responsibility to view any adjustments to default settings critically.

It’s all good and fine to be critical of your ILS, but you have to accept some responsibility as well and be willing to meet them halfway. Only then can you really complain about what the vendor isn’t doing.

 Share

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Library Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.