ebyblog students and information

High Costs for Libraries

From ecorrado:

I was at a meeting that was discussing ILS issues yesterday and someone from a small college said that their ILS costs them over 40% of the total library budget. She even clarified the total library budget part. I’m assuming she is not including staffing, but still, that is a big chunk of change.

I think moving to open-source could help this in the long run, though the initial costs could be similar. If they contract with a oss vendor then they will avoid license costs and in the long run may only need to pay for enhancements they actually want, meaning less large upgrades just to get a small feature.

However, I do think the real solution may require more collaboration or distribution of cost, maybe even a hosted model. I could see similar small libraries pooling resources to fund enhancements that specifically serve their users or pooling together for a combined ILS (with individual interfaces). I think this is similar to some of the stuff Talis is working on (data feeds) and I wouldn’t be surprised if some vendor offers hosted Evergreen or Koha on a subscription model to help save on the costs of buying hardware.

LibLime actually does offer a fully-hosted Koha and Evergreen on a subscription model. Here’s the Koha offering for Koha Classic and Koha ZOOM.

… I wouldn’t be surprised if some vendor offers hosted Evergreen …

Equinox Software does, in fact. In addition to the savings on capital investment, libraries can choose to reinvest some of their IT budget — most of what would normally be spent on a system administrator to tend their ILS – into other areas.