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The Library Business
Head of Information Technology Column forOctober 2006 A few months ago, I finally started a blog.Hectic Paceis a (usually) weekly blog about “the library business in the business of libraries” and an online companion to this column. While this might smack of self-promotion, I wanted to devote a little regular ink to what motivated me to finally take on another deadline. Talk to any of my editors (and I have had about eight or nine in as many years for various endeavors), and they will tell you that I have no problem with word count. I am at the keyboard very much as I am at the podium—prone to tangents and long-windedness. Every “quick question” has a long answer in my book. Anyway, I started the blog because I was beginning to find the Quick Clicks section of this column nonconducive to the types of announcements coming out of our industry these days. It is nearly impossible to state the facts, throw in some significance, and editorialize in 50–100 words. Since industry news has become my niche (and part of my passion for the profession), I thought a blog might finally be in order. Business decisions The thing is, I really love the library business. I like walking the vendor floor at conferences and talking to vendor representatives. Some of my best friends are vendors. It surprises me sometimes that a profession so obsessed with fighting stereotypes can be so condescendingly critical—“used car salesmen” is the typical critique—of a major, library-sustaining sector of the profession. Mergers, acquisitions, accounting scandals . . . call me a vendor pimp, but I find this stuff fun and interesting. And you don’t need an MBA to discern what is going on in the marketplace. Speculation is part of what business analysts do, and I am the first to admit that I have no such training, other than the on-the-job kind. Despite the altruistic nature of a career in libraries, I challenge anyone to describe their library work as untouched by corporate hands. The great thing about the library value balance equation (benefit to the user minus cost to the user equals customer value) is that we can subsidize the cost of services to our patrons. We do this all the time, and we would be burying our heads in the sand to call the determination of what services to offer, and at what cost, anything other than a business decision. We must also decide with whom we do business. It’s more than ILS vendors, publishers, and hardware manufacturers. More and more industries and entrepreneurs are waking up to the cautious, critical, but still profitable world of libraries. Sometimes we call these newcomers “third parties,” a phrase that I myself have thrown around too loosely in the past. For example, my library is the first party, my ILS vendor is a second party, and my new vendor for catalog searching is a third party. The last is actually still a second party. I’m going to stop using “third party” because its definition as someone other than one of the principals in a transaction is often misleading. It should be reserved for those not directly connected, or those who use our data or services without our consent or knowledge. This does not mean we can remain blissfully ignorant of third parties. Some third parties aren’t as hidden as they used to be. If your second-party vendor is getting something from a third, then your library better know about it. Vendors have been much better in the last few years about openly publicizing high-profile partnerships, but some are not as open, and mergers and buyouts can raise lots of questions about which third party rises to the top. This is a sort of a straw-man debate, so suffice it to say that I want to talk about all the first, second, and third parties in the library business. I will do it here, I will do it on Hectic Pace, over coffee, on the vendor floor, and just about anywhere else. Contracts and agreements The Contracts and Agreements section of the “Technically Speaking” column goes back a long way—back to a time before the U.S. market was saturated with automation, when many libraries were automating for the first time or upgrading from a circulation-only and acquisitions-only system, when companies sold software for the pre-web services of libraries, when the field of automation companies was expanding, not contracting. Times have changed. Press releases regarding library automation changes are now dominated by newer applications (metasearch, link resolvers, ERM, and RFID), “upgrades” to the flagship product of an acquiring company, and “migrations” by existing customers to a new version of their vendor’s software. Many automation announcements are for libraries overseas—not that this is an uninteresting trend in the market, but I have not always found it appropriate to report in American Libraries. And though I suspect that the only complaints will come from vendors and their marketing representatives, I do not plan to continue this section of the column, barring an announcement of some significance to the library community. Instead, I would point you all to two resources with which many readers are likely familiar:Library Technology Guides and lib-web-cats,two phenomenal web databases maintained by my friend and colleague, Marshall Breeding. The former is a near-comprehensive database of vendor press releases; the latter provides details on a library’s web presence, online catalog, and current and previous automated systems. I hope that every library will use these resources to go look up news about their vendors, and to ensure that the details in lib-web-cats are correct. If you’re from a library that wanted to see its name in print and you have an interesting story to tell about vendor partnerships, working with vendors, or serving patrons in new and interesting ways with library automation, then send it to me, and I will consider ways in which I can include those stories here, rather than trimming long press releases to create snippets of refrigerator journalism. Acquisition
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