@Graeme: I hadn’t thought of it like that, but four iPhone-sized jumps is a reasonable forecast – wow. I’m also sad Minuteman isn’t on board, but it sounded like you’re still getting your money’s worth out of III. As for the joint catalogs, I think the word is that they’ll stay separate for now, but cross-seachable with an extra click. Similar to the Virtual Catalog, but obviously easier.

@Gem: Man, it’s scary reading about someone else having the exact same problems as me – it’s like you’ve been watching me work. Thank you for the suggestions and link.

It turns out we decided to stay with Horizon for the next couple of years. SD still hasn’t announced an EOL and we couldn’t justify the cost of transitioning to another system yet.

1) I think Horizon should be able to collect more stats. It’s tricky to balance patron privacy with more stats but I think a lot more could be done in this area. We seem to spend a lot of time hoping an idea will work but don’t have much ability to actually track it. For instance, it would be nice to know how much “on display” items check out. Or, even better, be able to tag various “on display” collections so you can see if the x collection was more popular than the y collection.

From the patron side, a good spell check is essential. I did a snapshot of searches patrons performed and 13% of them were misspelled and as a result HIP returned no results. Of those misspelled searches, Google was able to offer a correct suggestion around 80% of the time. I wasn’t as impressed with the library-specific spell check solutions I saw (such as Aquabrowser, etc). It would also be nice if the catalog returns no results to offer alternative search suggestion and an integrated ILL request form.

This last one is petty and I don’t imagine it’s a problem in Evergreen but it drives me nuts that I can’t copy and paste a lot of the data in the staffpac. The ability to highlight data (such as a barcode) and send it directly to another module (like cki/cko, etc) would be great.

2) I hate that HIP doesn’t seem designed to stay up all the time. We have to take it down for “mass indexing” at least once a month and every little change to the interface requires a restart of JBOSS which makes it unavailable to the patrons for a couple of minutes. I wait to make major changes until Sunday morning when we’re closed but I know people are still using our catalog from their homes. I hate our system looking so flaky to our patrons.

Star Trek and the 24th century is a fine fixed point for the indefinite future, but in all likelihood, you’ll still be using this software in 2020. 2020! As Bruce Sterling says, 2020 will be as different from now as now is from 2000.

The iPhone isn’t quite two and a half years old, so 2020 might be four iPhone-sized jumps away.

On a more mundane level, is it a given that the three consortia will continue to maintain separate catalogs?