There is a lot of valuable information that gets passed along on email lists that then disappears into the ether. Most archives are open and searchable, but you must still know they are there and what terms to use when searching. Plus, the search engines are not the most sophisticated. So, with permission, I’m posting a question and answer letter that went out on OSS-4-Lib.

The knowedgable answers from a professional actually implementing an open-source ILS are worth more than a hundred of my opinons.

So I would like to ask to those who are using free software for the management of their library, how it works for them ?

Just great! We’ve been using Koha (www.koha.org) for a year now, and don’t miss our old commercial ILS at all.

What are are the key factors to have good support ?

Do it yourself. Or contract out to someone you know and trust. But either way, expect to spend some money and some time on support. Free software assumes that the product itself is free (of cost), but anything other than the “big” packages (like Mozilla, for example) will definitely require that someone with the skills to manipulate the software is available. If a library is not willing to commit to that responsibility, then free software is not for them.

Are you assuming the whole maintenance of your soft internaly or do you need help from outside ?

A combination of both. We fix small problems in house, but work with other developers to make larger changes in the code.

How much does it cost ?

Depends on how intensively the software is used, how important it is to the operation, how many parameters need to be set locally, etc., etc., etc. In our case, our free software is at the heart of our operation. I would estimate that we’ve spend $15,000 – $20,000 this past year, almost all of that in staff time. As we continue to fine-tune the software, that amount will decrease, but I wouldn’t expect it to ever be less than $5,000 per year.

To compare, the annual license fee for our commercial ILS was $12,000 per year.

What has changed since you are using free software ?

We get our software problems fixed in two days instead of two months. We have complete control of our data. We can easily interface with other software. In short, _we_ are in control, not some vendor.