On 1/25/2012 1:13 PM, Kyle Banerjee wrote:
itself. For example, there's a system used for many digital archives that
splits a field in two anytime a field that needs to be represented by an
XML entity is encountered. Name withheld to protect the guilty.
Why are we so eager to 'protect the guilty' in discussions like this?
Our reluctance to share info on problems with software we use (because
of fear of offending the vendor?) means that it's very difficult for a
library to find out about the plusses and minuses of any given product
when evaluating solutions.
Don't even bother googling -- nobody will publically call this stuff out
on a blog, or even in a public listserv! It's on private customer-only
listservs and bug trackers, or even more likely nowhere at all. When
you want to find out the real deal, you have to start from scratch,
contact personal contacts at other institutions that have experience
with each software you are curious about, and ask them one-on-one in
private. Wasting time, cause everybody has to do that each time they
want to find out the current issues, so many offline one and one
conversations (or so many people that just give up and don't even do the
'due dilligence'), only finding out about things your personal contact
happened to have encountered.
Why can't we just share this stuff in public and tell it like it is, so
the information is available for people who need it?
If you want to find out about problems and issues with _succesful_
software that isn't library-specific, it's not hard to. You can often
find public issue trackers from the developers, but if not you can find
public listservs and many blog posts where people aren't afraid to
describe the problem(s) they encountered, there's no 'protecting of the
guilty.' Hint, this is part of what _makes_ such software succesful.
Jonathan
