Sure. My brain is still waking up so this’ll help.

I wrote about ILS software a while ago and most of the points still stand: https://asgalvan.com/2016/12/05/architecture-of-authority/ https://twitter.com/lindsonmars/status/1354777764268830721

ILS software has security problems. Sierra was transmitting crap in clear text until a few years ago.

It’s designed by companies with limited views of what’s possible. Tools measure the limits of experience and the ILS, with its overly complex, hard where it should be flexible, flexible where it shouldn’t be is a good mirror of libraries I suppose.

Software demonstration is not software implementation. Ask anyone whose ever migrated to Alma.

It’s increasingly tied to analytics, which is a never satisfied consumer of data. We’re paying huge sums of money to give user data away and have it sold back to us.

In order for analytics to work effectively, you have to go all in: they more data you give the vendor, the creepier and more powerful the surveillance your analytics can perform.

Data normalization is Alma is just super watered down MARCEdit.

The amount of technical debt in our collective ILS data is astonishing, it’s why we can’t have nice things.

Workflows are variable. “We modeled them after beta libraries” gives me hives. Some libraries have terrible workflows and they’re apparently the ones getting tapped to model these systems lol.

They’re also modeled in ways that limit our relationships to objects, patrons, and limit research. I should be able to create a guest account that allows access to multiple library physical collections (licenses, hi) if those libraries agree to terms.

Becky brings up consolidation. Something like 80% of ARLs use a ProQuest ILS. Guess who’s making decisions about your systems because it isn’t those departments or leadership anymore, it’s ProQuest. https://twitter.com/yo_bj/status/1354809160685129738

We shouldn’t have to break things, fun as it might be, to get them to work.

Also ILS vendors take our work and don’t credit us. They sell our work to other libraries, like they did to Matt Reidsma for Link 2.0

You can read all about that nonsense in Matt’s book, now OA in our repository: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/library_books/19/

I might have more writing to do on this topic, anyway share your ILS takes with @lindsonmars