Library services IT Fiasco for 14 local authorities in SELMS

[PTK]

SELMS is a consortium of fourteen local authority public library services in England.
The computer system for SELMS was recently “upgraded”.
The upgrade took three weeks, rather than the one week that was planned.
The upgrade has caused many problems, a library worker told me.

I owed 97 p in fines for overdue books, but the system stated that I owed £15.05!
One of the books that I had borrowed had fallen off the system. The library worker asked me to read the bar code over the telephone, so that she could put it on the system.

I predict that this fiasco will lead to a number of books disappearing from libraries in the local authority areas of Brighton & Hove, Buckinghamshire, Camden, Hertfordshire, Kent, Medway, Milton Keynes, Reading, Richmond upon Thames, Slough, Southwark, Southend-on-Sea, West Berkshire, and Windsor & Maidenhead, all of which are part of SELMS.

I suggest that anyone who lives in an area covered by SELMS asks their local library authority some questions about this. Why was the “upgrade” necessary”? How much did it cost? How much was the private contractor paid for making such a mess?

SELMS | Home

 

[Orang Utan]

Ouch. My hunch is that the ‘upgrade’ was a migration from one Library Management system to a cheaper one. Happened with my council a couple of years ago, but we just lost books from the database. That was difficult enough to deal with and this sounds way more serious.
Typical short-term thinking. Buy cheap, pay for it later.

 

[Orang Utan]

BTW I doubt (m)any public libraries have their own bespoke LMS, so using private contractors would have been unavoidable.

 

[Puddy_Tat]

I use Reading library some times (in Berkshire, there's an arrangement you can use any of the councils' libraries, as there isn't a county council any more, and many bits of Wokingham borough are nearer to Reading than to Wokingham)

They have this message up on the website

Temporary library service changes

The Reading Libraries public catalogue won’t be available from 10pm on Wednesday 14 August until 6am on Thursday 15 August. We hope this work will resolve some of the remaining issues we are having following our system upgrade in July. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

 

[Callie]

Hmm an IT project overrunning you say? Well well well!

 

[PTK]

Ouch. My hunch is that the ‘upgrade’ was a migration from one Library Management system to a cheaper one. Happened with my council a couple of years ago, but we just lost books from the database. That was difficult enough to deal with and this sounds way more serious.
Typical short-term thinking. Buy cheap, pay for it later.

I don't understand how migration would make things cheaper.

 

[Puddy_Tat]

I don't understand how migration would make things cheaper.

i can't comment on the specifics here, but organisations including councils do occasionally change software - either old one is obsolete, or doesn't do what they now want, or the providers want to up the annual licence fee or a combination of these.

there can be times when the one-off cost / inconvenience of making the change can be offset by longer term savings.

although it sometimes doesn't work out like that when new software provider remembers that any further changes / upgrades will cost a heck of a lot of money...

 

[Orang Utan]

I don't understand how migration would make things cheaper.

Because the software package subscription and maintenance would be cheaper

 

[Pickman's model]

Ouch. My hunch is that the ‘upgrade’ was a migration from one Library Management system to a cheaper one. Happened with my council a couple of years ago, but we just lost books from the database. That was difficult enough to deal with and this sounds way more serious.
Typical short-term thinking. Buy cheap, pay for it later.

No, they're upgrading the lms spydus which they've been using for many years. Dk why it's turned into such a pig's ear

 

[Puddy_Tat]

No, they're upgrading the lms spydus which they've been using for many years. Dk why it's turned into such a pig's ear

as i've said it's not my line of business at all, but usually these things involve too many high level management people of the service talking to high level management of the tech people, and not enough of actual programmers talking to the people who actually use it...

 

[Pickman's model]

as i've said it's not my line of business at all, but usually these things involve too many high level management people of the service talking to high level management of the tech people, and not enough of actual programmers talking to the people who actually use it...

Yeh this will have played a great part, I think, if they only listened to fronting staff senior managers wouldn't make many of the mistakes they do

 

[StoneRoad]

Because the software package subscription and maintenance would be cheaper

Missed out "theoretically" !
and I would as over what timescale ...