Ross Singer of the Georgia Tech Library in his Dilettantie’s Ball posting – A proposal to Endeavor Voyager customers – makes the brave suggestion that instead of migrating to Aleph they should consider striking out on their own.

As he points out to those who are an

Endeavor Voyager site, you’ve got some decisions ahead.  Francisco Partners, naturally, would like you to migrate to Aleph, and I have no doubt that Ex Libris is, as I write this, busily working on a means to make that easy for Voyager libraries to do.  But ILS migrations are painful, no matter how easy the backend process might be.  There’s staff training,  user training, managing new workflows, site integration; lots of things to deal with.  Also, your functionality may not be a 1:1 relationship to what you currently have.  How do you work around services you depended upon?

Since soon our contracts with Endeavor Information Systems will be next to worthless, I propose, Voyager customers, that we take ownership of our systems. 

He goes on to suggest that for the price of an Oracle license, each site could gain write access to their database and produce new interfaces or graft on modules from Open Source systems such as Evergreen.  Ross proposes that this be called project ‘Bon Voyage’.

Ross has got a good point, why go through the pain and not insubstantial costs of migrating from one LMS/ILS which you have wrapped in to operation, to another which has probably got an equal number, but different set, of annoying idiosyncrasies and deficiencies and be no further forward to delivering a better service to your customers than when you started.

Any follower of Panlibus or who has has seen any of my colleagues or myself speak over the last few months will know that we know that the traditional monolithic library system has had its day.  The systems of the future will be assembled from many components, probably from several sources both Open and Commercial, some hosted locally and some from services provided as web services from within the Internet cloud.

Some of these services, and other developments on the Talis Platform which could operate closely coupled to a local ILS system, may well help in freeing Voyager Systems without the need for skilled developers at every site.  We would be more than happy to look at ways we could help with project Bon Voyage.

Power to your elbow Ross, I hope that your proposal gains traction and develops.  I shall be watching with interest to see how it does develop.  It will also be interesting to see how Ex Libris react to this ‘different’ solution to the problem of how they handle the Voyager community.

(photo taken by richardwallis displayed in Flickr)

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