Library Gazette

As many of you know, the ZSR library is beginning to look at open source alternatives to our current systems.  A few of us have seen Vufind in action and have talked about Open ILS alternatives.  This discussion is just starting and should yield some interesting results in the coming months.

One thing that I have heard from many people at our library is the need to have an easy to use online reporting tools for our information systems.  Every year we run EOY reports, general statistics, fund accounting reports in addition to lots of disposable queries.  Right now we are limited to using MS Access to design our queries and pull this information.  There are more sophisticated tools out there though.  Some of you may remember a brief period when we were using Cognos in conjunction with our departed ERMS.

In the last few years, a few companies that serve this purpose but in an open source environment have come along.  I was curious about what this market currently looked like and wondered what sort of functionality we would be looking for specifically so I created a short page in our Wiki to start gathering ideas.

If you are curious about what BI software does or want to add your thoughts - hit the wiki page.

By the way - more to come soon on evaluating Open Source Catalogs….