The debate on JISC's Library Management Systems Horizon Scan continues, with Tim Buckley-Owen reporting on the front page of CILIP's Library & Information Gazette on vendors' reactions. Disappointingly, their answers, somewhat defensive in tone, don't tackle the problems the report drew attention to, to wit the tendency to monopoly in the market, with four vendors controlling more than 90% of the higher education market and the ownership of two of those vendors, ExLibris and SirsiDynix who control over half the market, now in the hands of private equity. One could not hope for a better textbook example of the tendency to the concentration of capital in modern economies. Many of the systems we now use started their lives as altruistic co-operatives, such as SWALCAP and BLCMP, whose member libraries owned and managed the products collectively. There is a thesis waiting to be written on how the co-operatives were changed, willy-nilly, into conventional capitalist organisations.
I could overlook this, if vendors were able to use this way of running their businesses to pay for innovation. But, for all the Library 2.0 rhetoric, it is hard to see where the innovation is. The successful Library 2.0 initiatives that leap to mind mostly come from the ingenuity of library-based systems developers. When I came to my new job at South Thames College in March, I looked at our LMS (OLIB, since you ask). In its functionality, I cannot see anything in it that is different from another system which I installed over ten years ago in my time at the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons; and that most important part of the systems, the interface for our students and teachers, has not advanced one bit.
It would not hurt to start asking questions about the organisation and ownership of the vendors with whom we spend such considerable sums of money. £13.1 million for higher education alone.
