The Shifted Librarian: "A little
The Shifted Librarian: "A little realized fact outside of libraryland is that we're completely beholden to our database vendors. For the most part, we can't build our own software for running library catalogs, mainly because of a lack of money, time, resources, and programmer librarians. So we have to rely on the handful of vendors that make the software that runs our catalogs. Naturally, these vendors don't really play nicely together, and it's a very drawn-out process to switch from one vendor to another so it's relatively rare." Ah, that explains a lot.
# Oct 2, 2002