Library Technology Guides

Top survey findings

• Apollo, developed by Biblionix topped the rankings in ILS satisfaction and company satisfaction, and second best ILS Support. This product topped all of the satisfaction in last year’s survey results. Most libraries adopting Apollo and have migrated from abandoned products such as Winnebago Spectrum and Athena or or are automating for the first time. Apollo finds use exclusively in small public libraries.
• This year two open source ILS products earned top marks. OPALS, targeting K-12 school libraries and Koha when supported by ByWater Solutions.
• OPALS, an open source ILS created and supported by MediaFlex also gave stellar performance, ranking a tiny notch below Apollo in ILS satisfaction and company satisfaction and received top rankings in support satisfaction.
• ByWater Solutions did the best in the company loyalty department, placed third for ILS satisfaction, support satisfaction, and company satisfaction. ByWater Solutions provides support services for the Koha open source ILS.
• Products that ranked highest in earlier years of the survey, including and Polaris from Polaris Library Systems and AGent VERSO from Auto-Graphics, continue to receive satisfaction scores just as high as before, but fall below the superlative marks given by libraries involved with Apollo, OPALS, or Koha as supported by ByWater Solutions.
• Companies and products serving large and complex library organizations and diverse library types receive a broader range of responses, and fall into a middle tier of rankings. Yet where they fall within this middle ground represents important differences. Millennium from Innovative Interfaces, Library.Solution from The Library Corporation, and Evergreen from Equinox Software, and came out as very strong performers at the top of this middle tier.
• Except for the libraries already using one, the survey reflected fairly low levels of interest in migrating to an open source ILS, even when the company rates their satisfaction with their current proprietary ILS and its company as poor. Other than libraries already running an open source ILS, and for Voyager (5) and Aleph (1), the mode score from libraries using proprietary ILS products was 0. Though the open source interest scores were low, a substantial portion of libraries that registered some interest in moving to a new ILS named open source products among the replacement candidates.