[Koha] Sirsi in NZ!

[MJ Ray]

Waylon Robertson <wrobertson1981 at yahoo.co.nz> wrote:
> What....... how... who.... what madness is this? Did they even look
> at Koha? NZ, the birthplace of Koha... has, at a national level,
> rejected Koha? Or did they not know about Koha? Koha wasn't good
> enough for them?..... I feel ... like using lots of strong words.

Did the National Library of NZ use a procurement process?  Our co-op
has no-one in that timezone at the moment, so we wouldn't have been
watching.  Anyone here (supplier or librarian) see it?  Did it
disadvantage Koha in some way?  That might have been by structuring
the purchase in a way which favours all-in-one "black box" LMSes
rather than combinations of FOSS projects, using a specification
drafted by legacy LMS suppliers, by not taking into account the exit
cost of migrating away from a closed non-standard LMS at the end of
its contract period, or by requiring suppliers to take some legal form
which no Koha supplier currently uses.

Those are some of the reasons I often think procurement processes are
broken.  Our public services often pay over the odds to reward private
suppliers for gambling relatively large sums on playing nonsensical
bidding games.  Worse, there's often fairly large spending by the
public service to run the game and answer the inevitable questions
about it.  I suspect fairly few social enterprises play if they have
alternative sources of income.

I feel libraries seem a bit short-sighted on this sort of thing.  Each
extra dollar a supplier spends to win business (on procurement
processes, on expensive trade fairs run by so-called professional
bodies that are slowly becoming private enterprises, on glossy
brochures and sweatshop-made plastic promotional products mailed out
to libraries, ...)  is an extra dollar which some library must be
charged, plus administration cost.  If you'd like the biggest
bang-per-buck, please reward suppliers who spend their marketing money
in ethical ways that also support libraries or public communities.
Look at a trade fair stand and ask: what use is that to anyone?  Look
at free gifts and ask: who does this help?  What is its point?

</rant> ;-)

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and LMS developer, statistician.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire for Koha work http://www.software.coop/products/koha