Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Library Journal ILS Survey



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...

1 comment:

  1. I admit it is not as effective as it could be but I'm so used to it now that you work with what you have and most of the time it is fine unless there are some special circumstances...

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