[ipac] HIP searches and indexes

[David Pattern]

Ironically, whilst tidying my desk today, I came across a printout of the 2005 press release announcing that the University of Huddersfield would proudly be the first Corinthian site in the UK.  
 
Prior to that, we'd spent an entire year going to tender and evaluating all the major ILS products.  The outcome of all that was that Horizon 8 was the system of choice for us and the contract was awarded to Dynix (I'll bite my tongue and not mention where Sirsi Unicorn came in our scoring!)
 
About a week before it was culled, we had an in-depth day long Corinthian demo from our account manager (who was running the entire system off a modest laptop) and what I saw was a stable, fast and fully featured system.
 
Anyone who follows Marshall Breedings "Library Automation News" site will have noticed that it's the open source companies that are the ones busy announcing new customers. In the last couple of weeks alone, 6 libraries have announced that they're moving to Koha: Derby Public Library (Kansas), Government of Kerala (India), Sanbornton Public Library (New Hampshire), Blue Mountains Public Library (Ontario), New Durham Public Library (New Hampshire), and Southeast Kansas Library System.  Anyone care to guess how many of those 6 are Dynix/Horizon sites?  
 
Academic libraries in the UK are pretty much in limbo now -- every library that I know that had been planning to go out to tender (and I can name at least 5 off the top of my head) has chosen to put their plans on hold for the foreseeable future.  Quite simply, there isn't a commercial system out there which is worth the pain of a migration. 
 
regards
Dave Pattern
Library Systems Manager
University of Huddersfield
 

________________________________

From: ipac-bounces at lists.tblc.org on behalf of Stuart Miller
Sent: Thu 21/08/2008 15:06
To: jkuntz at rcls.org; Dynix's Horizon Information Portal,formerly iPac (discussion)
Subject: Re: [ipac] HIP searches and indexes



As a beta test site for Horizon 8 and with a collection of 5.2 million bibs and 10 million items, we did not see any problems related to inadequate scaling of Horizon 8. Admittedly, we were not in production. But we were prepared to go into production as soon as certain bugs were fixed. And since it addressed ALL the long-standing issues we had with the existing product, it is indeed highly regrettable that SirsiDynix killed Horizon 8. The people who worked on it got it right. That said, HIP 4.x was (is?) a disaster--we beta tested a version prior to Horizon 8 before being advised that we should wait for the Horizon 8 version.

 

If anything, killing Horizon 8 may very well mean a lot of trouble for SirsiDynix since, had it been released, there would have been a VERY ready market given the sorry state of the ILS marketplace-at least as it now exists for academic libraries. The only thing that killing Horizon 8 did for SirsiDynix was to convince a lot of their customers that open source was indeed something to be explored. If you talk to anyone at Equinox or LibLime, they openly attribute their recent successes and growth to the death of Horizon 8. 

 

Stuart Miller

University of Chicago Library

 

________________________________

From: ipac-bounces at lists.tblc.org [mailto:ipac-bounces at lists.tblc.org] On Behalf Of Jerry Kuntz - RCLS
Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 8:22 AM
To: Dynix's Horizon Information Portal, formerly iPac (discussion); ipac at lists.tblc.org
Subject: Re: [ipac] HIP searches and indexes

 

Keep in mind that the HIP product for Horizon 8 was slated to be HIP 4.x--and we already have ample evidence of how that worked out. We're not too torn up over the loss of Horizon 8, because our site has experienced the development nightmare that a certain former Dynix CEO presided over. I believe Horizon 8 would have shown itself to be unscalable and would have quickly killed the company, instead of allowing us the limited breathing room we now have.

Jerry Kuntz
Electronic Resources
Ramapo Catskill Library System
619 RTE 17M
Middletown NY USA 10940
jkuntz at rcls.org / jkuntz at optonline.net



 

 





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