Openly Pining for a Keystone
Well done to all concerned with getting the fascinating experiment that is Evergreen out of the door and into real-world operation. It’s quite an achievement, and one that all of us here continue both to wish well and to watch with keen interest.
I found one of the team’s ‘What we did wrong‘ items particularly interesting;
“We didn’t anticipate the immediate increase of OPAC usage. When a tool isn’t painful to use, people seem to use it more. (Imagine that.) It also helps when the catalog [is] kind of pretty to look at.”
Indeed. ‘Imagine that’.
In re-imagining the information environment to become one in which Open Content and Open Data become ever more real for everyone (not just the favoured few), Open Source of course plays an important part, and we at Talis continue to grapple with ways in which we can extend our current contributions to the Open Source community whilst ensuring both the long-term sustainability and growth of this organisation and meeting our ongoing commitments to support and sustain existing customers. Watch the TDN over the next few days for news of our next step on this journey.
Nothing in this new world is wholly free, as someone - somewhere - has to invest in creating and maintaining software, data, expertise and more. In Evergreen’s case, the State of Georgia presumably foots most of the bill. A Georgian may therefore have a different perspective on the ‘free’-ness of Evergreen to someone in the UK, whilst both can do something they can’t do with a traditional ILS/LMS running in a library outside Georgia; they can download it and run it themselves. They can improve it. They can pick it apart and see how it ticks. That’s undeniably valuable, and it’s undeniably a huge step forward. But. It. Is. Not. FREE.
The trick - as with Open Data - isn’t to turn all anarchical, shoot the vendors and simply give everything to everybody. It can’t be, because large swathes of the LIS world (well, those you didn’t shoot for being vendors, anyway) would pretty quickly end up unemployed, as there would be no money to pay them with. And then hungry, as there would be no way to acquire food. And then starved. Not a particularly smart move.
The trick is to recognise that ‘value’ continues to exist. The value may very well be moving (who, in their right mind, could sensibly argue that there is still value in paying to tell someone you hold a copy of a book in your library?), but that doesn’t mean it’s gone away altogether. You just need to find where it’s going, and get there before it does. It’s also important to recognise that value is not only measured in terms of cash payments, and that it needn’t necessarily be the beneficiary who ‘pays’. The beneficiaries (users) of Flickr don’t have to pay (unless they go Pro). Yahoo! pays. But Yahoo! doesn’t meet all those bandwidth, storage and development costs out of the goodness of its collective corporate heart. Yahoo! pays because it recognises value in ways other than a straightforward (and ultimately limiting) payment at the door. An individual user may use Flickr for years, and never directly give Yahoo! a cent/penny/whatever, but that doesn’t mean that Yahoo! haven’t gained value from the user in a host of tangible and intangible ways.
Think about it. Some of the possibilities are pretty exciting. By recognising that value is shifting, by seizing the opportunities that creates, and by re-architecting the models by which all of this gets paid for, we create opportunities for hugely increased usage. The value not only shifts, but it grows, too.
So, returning to libraries, Evergreen is well worth keeping an eye on. So are any vendors prepared to think differently, and engage in the conversation. We are, and maybe it’s past time for some of us to mosey on over to Georgia for a visit. Is anyone else interested, or is that lovely sand keeping your neck nice and warm?
Technorati Tags: API, Flickr, Library 2.0, OPAC, Open Source, Talis, Talis Keystone, TDN, Web 2.0, web services, Yahoo
