Information Takes Over

“As I see it, in the world of the library management system, amidst the turmoil of takeover and merger, the only constant is the fact that experimentation is free.”

That’s what I started to write in this post, but then I thought, actually no it isn’t.

I was originally thinking along these lines after a conversation I had with Richard Wallis from Talis while marching back to the station last thursday. I was aking about the practicalities of creating a Herefordshire specific union catalogue based on the Talis Platform. The upshot was that I could experiment, but then at the point when the service went live, there would probably be a cost. Therefore experimentation is free.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not getting all petulant that I can’t have totally free stuff. It’s just that I realised that in my excitement I was getting carried away on the experimenting part and forgetting the service delivery and maintenance part.  Both very important in the planning stages!

But why change my mind and decide that experimentation is not free?

Experimentation – in the web 2.0 world – is not free. The code may be freely available, and the APIs may be openly accessable, and the data may be sitting there waiting to be openly mashed, but, when you think carefully about what is happenning, you see the strings.

Let’s deal with some specifics…

1. The code is free, but you need to understand the code. I forget the amount of times when I have downloaded a toolkit to have a look-see; and thought it beyond me. I’m not a programmer, I am a tweaker. I know what I want to achieve, and I can usually get there if I have a good body of code and some examples to tweak.
2. But I have only so many hours in the day. Time – isn’t free. I have bills to pay, and a job to pay them with, but that doesn’t leave a huge amount of time if I want to have a social life too.
3. There are also usage strings attached. Yes you can use Amazon jacket images in your site, but only so long as they point back to Amazon.
4. Finally, there is the cost of moving from experimentation to live service. You need to maintain the code, the API calls may change. The API may vanish, or no longer be supported. The licensing may change.

Perhaps I shoud say “experimentation is low cost“.  And it is that low cost prototyping that is going to allow us to feel our way towards the solutions that we crave.

Technorati Tags: library2.0, web2.0, talis, library, experiement, cost