1. Blog Setup.

This blog was created in order to post here some of my assignments for the Information Storage and Retrieval course.

The main theme of this blog will be an examination of the benefits of an Open Source ILS (as oppose to a proprietary ILS). I became interested in Open Source ILS when we decided to implement one of such systems -- Koha -- as our library's ILS.

The main advantage of an Open Source ILS is not only that it is free but that it affords freedom (both for a developer and user). But this freedom comes at a price. During a last year users' conference (KohaCon 09) I heard a very apt statement: "When we say that Koha is free, we do not mean as in free beer, but as in free puppy. As I am working on migrating the data from our old system, I am appreciating this statement more and more!

My interests are primarily in an Academic Library -- this is where I have been working for the number of years now.