We’ve been in a cargo cult for several decades, waiting for library software vendors to cure our ills. Not too long ago I met a librarian who with a wan smile told me she was actually “trained” on Taos, the vaporware DRA promised its customers before DRA stopped being DRA.
Now we hear that Sirsi-Dynix has abandoned Horizon 8.0.
Someone asked why anyone cared.
First, there aren’t that many ILS vendors any more, so when one sneezes, we all notice.
Also, the fact that they killed it is significant. Andrew Pace addressed one of the big reasons that yes, it matters: with a viable open source product on the “market,” egregious missteps by ILS vendors generate interest elsewhere.
Oh, and for the record, as grumpy as I am about it, at MPOW we are going to deploy Vista on a group of machines. Not the majority, because most of our workstations don’t have the oomph to support Vista. But despite my grumblings, I’m in that cargo cult, as well.
Posted on this day, other years:
- A Basic Homebrewing Collection for Your Library - 2009
- - 2009
- Camcorder Suggestions? - 2006
- Camcorder Suggestions? - 2006
- San Jose Library Blasted in Bayosphere - 2006
I am feeling like the mid-1980s all over again. This is not a good thing….the results may ultimately be good for people who use libraries, but I think it will be a good long time before that’s the case.
I don’t know – even the name, Rome, seems a poor choice. I keep hearing things like “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” and thinking of Nero (new Sirsi CEO?) playing his fiddle while rome burns… Not very comforting, to say the least!
Or maybe Horizon 8.0 is the new Notis Horizon 1.0? When Ameritech acquired both Notis and Dynix in the early 1990s, the original Notis client-server project that was destined to be the way ahead for mainframe customers was called “Horizon” which, itself, was a last minute name change because the original moniker, “Otis”, was already in use. Within a year, and despite firm statements to the contrary, Ameritech pulled the plug on Notis Horizon and rebranded Dynix Marquis as “Horizon”, a lineage that continued until this recent announcement. We were one of a group of 15 beta libraries that were left in the lurch by these developments. No one sued, much was lost, and a lesson was created for future scribes.
Hey, I got (semi) trained on TAOS! I feel like I should win something…
Let me shed some light to this matter.
I’ve been a developer on the Taos project prior to Sirsi. It was a fast and reliable system developed by a team in St. Louis and another team in Montreal. Both teams worked very closely with lead librarians to focus on important aspects of the library systems.
After Sirsi’s take over, they decided to kill the Taos project on the basis that Unicorn was faster. This decision took everyone by surprise, as the test elements were disproportionate. Of course Unicorn appeared faster since it was installed on faster hardware and using a smaller database!
Looking at the code and comparing features, it was clear that Unicorn took many shortcuts about some features. For a start, they claim to support various types of call numbers but they sort them alphabetically. Everyone knows that’s not how call numbers are sorted!
As for technology, Taos was using innovative technologies that promised easy maintenance and portability. Unicorn used a vast spectrum of legacy technologies that promised hard work for simple updates. Seeing some changes done in Unicorn to support Unicode, I simply couldn’t rely on some aspects of the system.
It is only when they announce to close the Montreal’s office that Sirsi, an investment company, only wanted to buy DRA / Multilis market share and acquire DRA’s private jet.