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Already using open source; OPALS was developed and is supported by Media Flex. Very rapid response in fixing minor programming issues--usually within 24 hours or less. Prompt responses to inquiries, and unfailingly courteous and appreciative when bugs are reported and enhancements are suggested. Online documentation is a plus, though it is not always as thorough as needed for all functions. Our system is hosted by vendor. Host site bandwidth and processor speed/capacity have been excellent. There are some response time issues at present due to a bottleneck (equipment malfunction?) located midway between our site and the host site--a potential issue for any hosted system.
The program our district purchased, Bibliofiche OPALS, is a circulation system with training wheels. The basic premise is there, but it is painfully obvious that whoever wrote the program never cataloged a book or understands what a high school library needs a library management system to do. For example, it ought to assign barcodes to incoming materials, but doesn''t; it won''t prevent reserved books from being checked out, so materials then have double status: reserved and checked out, which should never be able to happen; the reserved material list expires, without the ability of librarian to chose expiration date and expires without leaving a record of what had been on the list; circulation report by graduation year is not possible, so keeping control of Senior obligations will require checking one by one; the labeling options are very limited; all too often, we go to do something, either run a report or check some sort of record and we find it cannot be done. The company is receptive to these concerns and has even gone so far as the admit OPALS is a "work in progress", but that is not how it was sold to us. We are paying for a product that we are building for them, because the issues we address are supposedly going to be "corrected" in future versions. We are the guinea pigs.
We have an new open source ILS--OPALS. Except for speed during checkout, we love it. We have about 15000 items in our library
Our migration to our new system was not planned out which is why were are experiencing a lot of problems.
Migration/install services have been excellent. Technical support services have never been ideal, and have deteriorated badly in the past year. Software enhancement work has become quite slow, due possibly to substantial staff losses by the support vendor. LibLime is moving to a new LibLime Enterprise version which appears to be a fork in the Koha system. That is a serious concern to us.
Harry Chan and his team from Media Flex (http://mediaflex.net) worked with high school libraries receiving funding from the [...] grant to develop a simple, affordable ILS that displays and searches in both Hebrew and English. The system can be used by other libraries that need non-Latin alphabet capability. Our [...] libraries are using OPALS themselves and we have also used it to create a union catalog available [...]
So far we have migrated 37 Mandarin catalogs records/patrons to OPALS starting Aug 2005 which houses all catalogs to one location server at [...]. This makes the support narrative easier eg. upgrade, backup, and help desk. For this period Internet access to OPALS has worked with very little down time. OPALS has also added an Equipment module and a class room Textbook module which we are using the Textbook module. I see the next evolution of ILS' with catalogs having pre-populated video record information with links to video streaming content, some content would be generated inhouse and some with video streaming providers eg. Unitedstreaming. This would have one logon user authentication.
Media Flex's OPALS is a great value for the price. The company is very interested in customer feedback and provides system updates based upon it. Customer service is also great; my issues are resolved quickly.
We are very satisfied with Bibliofiche and their support team. The only feature that we would like more of would be major library links to import records from.
We love OPALS! Whenever we give feedback to the OPALS/Mediaflex folks, they integrate our needs within a few months.
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