Library Technology Guides

Top survey findings

• Apollo, developed by Biblionix topped the rankings in ILS satisfaction, Company satisfaction, Functionality Completeness, Customer Support, and Customer Loyality. This product scored best last year in product and company satisfaction and topped all of the satisfaction catetories in the 2009 survey. Apollo finds use exclusively in small public libraries, reflected by its leading the competition on ILS satisfaction when considering only libraries with collections under 25,000 items. When lookinig at only public libraries, Apollo receives top ratings in ILS satisfaction. Most libraries adopting Apollo and have migrated from abandoned products such as Winnebago Spectrum and Athena or or are automating for the first time.
• When considering large libraries with collections larger than one million items, Polaris received highest scores, followed by Millennium.
• EOS.Web ranked second in the category of ILS support.
• 566 libraries indicated that they are considering migrating to a new ILS. Innovative Interfaces Sierra was mentioned most frequently as a replacement candidate (88), followed by Evergreen (87).
• Products that ranked highest in earlier years of the survey, including and Polaris from Polaris Library Systems, Library.Solution from The Library Corporation, AGent VERSO from Auto-Graphics, continue to receive satisfaction scores just as high as before, but fall below the superlative marks given by libraries involved with Apollo, OPALS, or Koha as supported independently or by ByWater Solutions.
• Companies and products serving large and complex library organizations and diverse library types receive a broader range of responses, and fall into a middle tier of rankings. Yet where they fall within this middle ground represents important differences. Millennium from Innovative Interfaces, Library.Solution from The Library Corporation, and Evergreen from Equinox Software, and came out as very strong performers at the top of this middle tier.
• Except for the libraries already using one, the survey reflected fairly low levels of interest in migrating to an open source ILS, even when the company rates their satisfaction with their current proprietary ILS and its company as poor. Other than libraries already running an open source ILS, and for Talis Alto (5), the mode score from libraries using proprietary ILS products was 0. The mode score in this category for all the open source products was 9. Though the open source interest scores were low, a substantial portion of libraries that registered some interest in moving to a new ILS named open source products among the replacement candidates.