It started a week ago when Paul Miller speculated about the motivations behind the proposed purchase of SirsiDynix by Vista Equity . Paul’s thought processes were prompted by Andrew Pace’s coverage of the announcement (pdf) which was released around the festive holiday.

Paul’s musings about the different priorities brought about by the various ownership models at play in today’s library marketplace make interesting reading.

In the comments to his post Paul was admonished by Kathryn Greenhill for leaving the Open Source options out of his analysis. There then develops an interesting conversation between the two that is well worth a read.

Talking of conversations, get yourself signed up to the NGC4Lib (Next Generation Catalogs for Libraries) mailing list. Well worth joining to listen in on insightful discussions around the next generation library catalog and associated library stuff. (Archives available here)

Coinciding with the conversation on Paul’s Panlibus posting, Eric Lease Morgan started a NGC4Lib thread with the subject ‘mergers and acquisitions‘. This thread has been actively contributed to for several days, and even spawned a follow up thread ‘Commercial Open Source Software‘ - more of which later.

Some thoughtful quotes from the mergers and acquisitions thread:

If we were to leave it up to the ILSs, there would be no next generation library catalog. In my experience, for us to be able to integrate any of the interesting ’social’ or ‘web2′ characteristics into our catalogues we will have to pay through the nose. I know this from experience. ILS vendors won’t ever solve all of our problems. It is a small market, compared to other areas of business. The current shakedown was inevitable.
David Kane

After 9 years in industry I try to take people at their word; I keep my ears open and my mouth shut (well, most of the time). As for the truth of a situation, it is usually right in front of us, is it not? Its an open secret that the ILS marketplace has collapsed. The market has decided that there were too many vendors and too many products. Vendor consolidation has proceeded apace; product consolidation is about to proceed apace.
Mark Andrews

Luckily we now have both Koha and Evergreen, so the proprietary big boys can’t have it _all_ their own way any more. Yes, there are reasons (both good and bad) why some libraries will continue to prefer a proprietary solution over an open-source one, even when the open-source solution is technically superior. But the numbers of such libraries will surely decrease: those proprietary ILSs that survive will have to do so by straightening up and flying right.
Mike Taylor

My prediction is that these big boys won’t have finished integrating all of their acquired systems before a really strong open standards / open source community develops with a strong emphasis on a modular approach to building library solutions, such as could be provided by Talis.
David Kane

OSS is not without metrics, and adopting or rejecting Open Source does not have to be a throw of the dice.
Art Rhyno

I could quote loads more, but hopefully that lot will encourage you to read it yourself. Lorcan Dempsey has previously shared this concern:

It is surprising to me that there is not more discussion in the library community about the structure of the industry which supports it.

The comments to Paul’s posting and this NGC4Lib thread seems to dispel my assertion early in the thread that the library community does seem averse to discussing commercial issues, which can only be healthy and welcomed.

Librarians have something to say, members of the Open Source community have something to say, we at Talis have opinions on the subject, even Lorcan Dempsey thinks there should be discussion about the LMS/ILS supply industry. - So why is there such a deafening silence from the rest of the vendor community? Has nobody got, or allowed to have, any opinions on the industry they work in and the upheaval it is going through.? There must be someone with something to say. - I’m sure the community that depends on the products they supply will be very interested to hear from them.

(Photo taken by ehrgeizier displayed in Flickr)

Technorati Tags: Talis, Library, Cataloging, Library 2.0, Web 2.0, Vendors, SirsiDynix

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