Recently I was reading the last issue of Library Journal. As a reference librarian I have a decent amount of time that I can devote to library periodicals and while I will admit besides resident curmudgeon, and editor John Berry, I don't really care for LJ. But, this issue has a survey of librarians concerning their Integrated Library Systems - or ILS. I was very curious to see how Sirsi stacked up since I use it in my library and really can't stand the clunky, non-intuitive nature of it. I was not surprised to see it rank at the bottom of most of the surveys. I would really like to meet the 36% of librarians who would recommend SirsiDynix Symphony to a colleague and ask them "Why? Why would you submit anybody to the pure torture that is Symphony?" The advanced searching function is terrible, I have to double check every search since I don't trust the search mechanism, and it crashes on me constantly. Now some of this could be a library catalogers fault, and some could be blamed on the servers, but I have talked to other librarians and they agree that Symphony is terrible. Which is why Miami Dade recently switched to Polaris and Alachua County is considering a switch.
Here is the article...
