Northern Pines Open ILS

On April 17th, the British Columbia, Canada Public Libraries Service Branch (PLSB) proposed a 5-year phased implementation of the Evergreen ILS in BC. From their talking points:

- PLSB finds the risk associated with the Evergreen Open ILS to be no greater than the risk associated with the acquisition of an ILS product in the traditional marketplace. In fact, PLSB finds the risk reduced.

- The Public libraries in BC currently pay ILS vendors a conservatively estimated $700,000 annually for software maintenance. If the six federation ILS groupings and each independent public library system in BC purchased or upgraded their vendor ILS products to one of the leading products on the market by the end of 2011, PLSB estimates the total expenditure at over $10 million for the 5 year period.

- PLSB estimates implementation of Evergreen across BC at just over $2 Million over 5 years, one fifth of the cost projected for market-based solutions.

Oh, and I love their quote:

"libraries can do so much more collectively than any one library can do individually!"

Still, for some reason libraries seem to embrace this philosophy for everything but information systems. Sphere: Related Content