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Though we are considering both open source ILS and discovery products, we are tied to the University system consortium. However, the system is discussing these options and has recently purchased the Summons product.
We have a new Acquisitions Librarian who believes that open source ILS is the way of the future but because of our standalone status, the cost is currently not within our grasp.
We have a discovery product, Encore, but will consider moving to another one depending on which seems to offer the best fit for our needs.
We are currently using a discover tool from the ILS vendor that is integrated with other tolls from the same vendor.
We are unhappy with the customer service from our current ILS vendor, since our last upgrade in December 2008, we have had persistent problems. The vendor's support since all avenues of investigation they were willing to pursue were exhausted has been subpar except when dealing with critical issues, such as restarting database processing when necessary. Our System is currently in merger talks and will be considering sharing an ILS platform with the other automated groups within the new System, and don't intend to consider our current ILS for that joint platform.
Innovative continues to structure its fees as if we are still experiencing the economy of 5-6 years ago. If their products do not become more affordable, we will be forced to consider other options.
III seems to be trying to stay on the cutting edge of ILS developments. Being III though they are very expensive. Also, their service has always been a problem, although the new encore server team seems to be more responsive.
I found many of the questions difficult to answer because we are part of a large consorium[...]. We have a say in how the ILS operates and the parameters and bells and whistles we do or do not want, but we really don't have any contact with the vendor.
The 'open source ILS' is not very different from the proprietary ILS. Most libraries will still rely upon a third party organization to support and develop the 'open source ILS'. As has been done in the past on the proprietary side, open source ILS companies will continue to merge and acquire each other, or default. Rates will increase to support the growing open source ILS companies, and 'open source' will begin to look quite similar to 'proprietary'. In these financially challenging times, libraries would be prudent to acquire stable systems with known costs, rather than rolling the dice and hoping that 'open source' will be a panacea for ther automation needs.
We can't afford to stay on Millennium and it's increasingly clumsy and antiquated. I'd really like to see the [...] look into open source ILS solutions or maybe even go with OCLC's system when it's ready.
III used to have fairly prompt, efficient customer service. I'd say in the past 6 mos. or so, it has gone downhill. I have tickets sitting in the queue for months with no response and some of the responses I receive appear to be from folks who don't have a good grasp of basic grammar and often don't answer the question correctly (becomes obvious that they did not read the info entered into ticket).
Note that III has provided an excellent product that still works well. However, I am not happy with the webopac portion of their product. One of the major reasons we are looking at other vendors is because of basic functionality (faceted browsing, spell check etc) that is part of other companies standard web catalogs, but must be purchased from III. Because we have had the III product for so long, we are not getting any new functionality and feel as if they are not updating their current products. Since we must purchase new products, it makes sense to investigate other ILS's.
summon selected. implementation 1st quarter 2011
We already use Encore as our discovery interface but will be evaluating other players against Encore in the coming year. We will especially be comparing the quality, relevancy, and speed of results returned by those vendors who maintain centralized indexes versus Encore which has direct knowledge of our Millennium library database but which federates article searches. Conceptually, I see benefits and pitfalls of both options. Meanwhile all of the products continue to evolve rapidly. It is definitely a moving target.
As a small library in a group of over 50 libraries, we are hog tied as far as moving to another provider. As long as the system continues to function there is little chance of moving to a different system.
Innovative's Millennium products continue to be pretty solid although pricey little devils. We're looking forward to using Encore.
Millennium is a solid system but improvements are negligible without purchasing new, expensive products.
We are currently using Innovative Encore and consider it an integrated part of the ILS.
our dissatisfaction with III is that it's 1) too expensive and not open with its pricing, 2) additional modules are created primarily with an eye for creating new revenue streams, 3) they've moved away from customization of the catalog, a feature possible in classic catalog, toward being very unfriendly to modifications with Encore, and finding a way to charge for every possible modification.
The state of our state's economy is a weighty factor in any consideration of changes we are facing.
Support provided by III to Australian based libraries is very poor mostly due to diferrent time zones. The product itself is too costly and most of the newly developed features are sold separately instead of including them in core product.
Open Source seems very tantalizing until you get to the support part, which is very specialized and which requires a lot of resources.
I'm not sure what you mean by discovery interface. We use Serials Solution for our federated search and a-z list. Koha will facet our catalog search so we are not looking to integrate our serials solution product with our catalog on purpose. We will be using ByWaters Solution for our Koha migration - expected completion date is June 2011.
cost of maintenance fee is too high
Migration from Millennium is inevitable due to their high maintenance costs. Millennium is overall a good ILS, though it tends to be buggy, and the fixes for the bugs are only available after a long wait for the next release. Some modules, or components, of the system need to be fully integrated into the whole. I have often referred to some of the modules as 'half modules'; for example, the Interlibrary Loan module is not fully integrated into the Circulation module (and there appears to be no indication that it will improve). I am also unsatisfied with Research Pro and the new 'half module' Web Management Reports Spreadsheet version. I like Millennium and have no desire to go to another ILS, but the costs are too exorbitant for us to continue to do so.
All products are very pricey for small institutions
Innovative support has improved in the past year.
Manual can be difficult to navigte and often does not apply to an individual library's situation. We are in the situation of 'inheriting' the ILS as other employees have moved on, the remaining employees have had no formal training. Cost effective methods for obtaining this training are not really available.
Our biggest complaint with the company is they do not work with us during the hours we are closed, causing considerable problems for us.
Our long-standing III rep left II within the past year, plus the recent software releases have been buggy for essential functions such as holds.
If there were a viable alternative for a large public library, we would definitely investigate another vendor. We are keeping a close eye on King Co and Evergreen.
Innovative Interfaces has chosen to invest in federal litigation, instead of in fundamentals like product development and customer relations/support. I have watched the vendor’s regional presence decline rapidly over the past five years and the once-vibrant regional users group is now , in practical terms, defunct. My institution is actively exploring migration from Innovative Millennium. There are many things that the Innovative Millennium system does well, in terms of supporting my library’s back office operations. Also, Innovative’s help desk and support group provides support that’s satisfactory or better in virtually all cases. This allows my institution to approach migration in a more deliberative, less desperate, way. A major systems limitation has been the inability to export III Electronic Resources Management (ERM) data to WorldCat. I am very unhappy with Innovative’s strategic decision making, which culminated in the federal lawsuit that Innovative and SkyRiver filed against OCLC. As a decade-long customer of III and an active participant in Innovative regional and national user groups, I see a company that’s trying to use litigation to make its highly-proprietary, non-standard products viable in the library marketplace.
We already have a discovery interface -- Encore.
Could be interested in an open source ILS like Koha - mainly for cost saving reasons, but fear lack of support to implement and maintain (on our end as well as from a given provider)
Interested in open source solutions that extend ILS behaviour. e.g. discovery platform, mobile access
We have already purchased Encore discovery interface/ next gen catalog.
Innovative works closely with us to give us the ILS we want within our security parameters.
I put "3" for open source ILS only because we're currently happy with what we have. If we were truly looking for a new ILS, open source would be rated about a "6".
We are launching a comprehensive review of library technologies to determine needs, prompted by realization that the [...] Libraries' current technology infrastructure is inadequate.
I don't have enough staff resources to deal with opne source.
While new things are always being conscidered, the cost of changing is pretty high. That means that a new kid on the block has to offer an extreme number of benefits for a significant savings in order to make our heads turn.
Our ILS vendor is very responsive and will to do custom programming. Integrated resource sharing is something we feel sets our vendor apart.
We are migrating to SirsiDynix because we want to serve our patrons better by using the same ILS as the majority of the libraries in our system, not because we don't like III.
Searching is not very user friendly for the public. It needs to have more advanced keyword searching and identify series books.
Innovative does have a fine ILS, but they do not provide full SIP 2 integration with third party vendors for self-service products. Not allowing full use of Millennium functions with third party products has limited the quality of service we have been able to offer our patrons.
We are happy with III/Millennium except for the cost. If we switch to an open source alternative, it will be primarily to save money.
Our next-gen catalog is Encore. We implemented Encore in the fall of 2010. We also use the free version of WorldCat Local.
We would love to have a discovery interface or next generation catalog. Our patrons and staff are more than ready for this. It's a question of lack of funds.
The ILS plays a proportionately smaller role in the overall information seeking needs of our users who primarily seek journal articles and locate them via seamless links in online databases.
We are a member of a public/academic consortium, and as such, do not ordinarily deal directly with our ILS vendor (Innovative). Our network staff does that on our behalf. Our consortium is currently committed to migration to an Evergreen open-source ILS in January 2012, and we are very much looking forward to it.
We had hoped to migrate this summer but it seems the date will be kicked back a year or so. With this in mind we are considering a Discovery tool that will be usable now as well as after migration. It is frustrating that every change/upgrade we want to make involves a major investment- most of which we will be unable to use if we go open source. Money is a major issue and the ILS seems to demand more than it's share. We do understand opensource does not mean free but don't have a good understanding of the potential cost..
Enhancements to Milennium over the last year or two have increased its usefulness and made it easier for the library staff to understand and utilize.
Our staff is stretched very thin; at this time it's not possible for us to undertake the research and staff development needed to change ILS vendors or implement an Open Source ILS (i.e. learning server administration and programming languages or hiring a specialist, researching the implementation procedure, and training staff to perform workflows under a new system). We are planning to upgrade to a more recent version of Millennium (and possibly add a discovery tool) next summer when we have time to undertake the upgrades.
Price for our current ILS is becoming unbearable, forcing us to seriously consider all available alternatives.
Opinions of III products, pricing & services vary widely throughout the staff in the two libraries in the [...] Consortium. Newer professional staff tend to be more impatient & critical than those of us who have worked with (grown-up with) III over the last 20 years. There is interest in open source tools, believing they would be a panacea to all woes, but a lack of real knowledge about the maturity of such products and the actual costs of implementation and operation.
Acquisition training by Innovative was expensive, disappointing and confusing. Training was nonlinear and could not take staff through the linear process of ordering a book beginning to end. This is not among one of Innovative's strong points for our experience. Nine months later, the staff is still meeting with other colleges who have the system to learn how to use it.
Our vendor's maint. and other fees are high (i.e. they offer their reworked user interface as a seperate product 'encore' as opposed to including it as part of an upgrade) Our vendor's support personnel are much appreciated. Their support is consistant and improved over last year
Put out a Request For Information for a discovery platform this year, very disappointed with III's response.
We have just started with LibraryWorld in July of 2010. It seems like a good system for our small library and the economics are super compared to Millenium. A little clumsy with interlibrary loan.
We are in a statewide consortium for our ILS and therefore have the advantage of the consortium office negotiating with the company, buying and managing all the servers, doing upgrades, conducting training, running a help desk, etc.
In 2010 moved to using Summon as a discovery interface. As a results stopped using Encore and Research Pro.
Would consider open source ILS once the systems mature. As of now, we're content with the ILS we have. About the only complaint I have is that it's expensive to maintain.
I am concerned about the lack of development on the Millennium platform. It seems that there is so much development for SkyRiver and Encore, but hardly any for Millennium.
We are examining what we would need in a system shared among the 3 dozen libraries in one of our consortia. There is a great variation in size and complexity among the members, so needs differ. We are also looking at which business processes are unique to the library and which ones could be mainstreamed into existing campus systems, even if that means overhauling some legacy practices. I would like to be able to answer the question "what is the minimum subset of functions that the library management software needs to provide" based on today's environment and not on 30 year old requirements from a print-based world.
Most question answers are neutral, as the [...] consortium deals directly with III, not individual libraries. However, as an individual library we have grown less and less satisfied with our current system (question 1), and the consortium is definitely moving ahead with Evergreen within the next 12 months
Millennium technical support is much more responsive than ExLibris Voyager support was. We have issue with Innovative Interfaces not telling us that certain functionalities were not included in the contract. Those separately priced "Products" were revealed *after* the contract was signed and all negotiating power was lost. Caveat emptor.
We are part of a Consortium [...] which is the only way we could afford Millenium in the first place. Having Millenium is (or is supposed to be) an incentive for other libraries to join or Consortium. That hasn't worked out but we are committed as a Consortium. [...] is made up of academic and public libraries. My take on Millenium is that it works better for the academics, but we (as an individual library) would be hard pressed to come up with something half as good on our own. Open Source would be wonderful but even as a Consortium we don't have the time or expertise to pull it off.
This library has AquaBrowser v2, which might not be fully supported by Serials Solutions after 2012, and will consider acquiring a discovery interface to replace it
We just started with Millennium in September 2010. Branch staff has little to do with contacting the provider in regards to customer support. We contact our Central office and they take it from there.
Growing interest in open source. I don't think the ILS functionality is there yet, but a discovery catalog option is a possibility. Despite the fact that we just licensed Encore, we intend to have a committee looking at all our discovery catalog options for the future including open source, specifically Vu-Find, since another III consortium has successfully made this work with our ILS. We'll also look at AquaBrowser in its new configuration and compare that to the functionality we'll have with Encore over the next couple of years.
We have looked into Summon, Ebsco EDS discovery platform and Worldcat local but are not moving away from Encore at this time.
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