Horizon upgrade or Aleph 500?

Hi all!
I am sure that you all now the news about the end-of-life of SirsiDynix's Horizon and the future release of ROME. Our library uses HORIZON for 10 years now and we were planning to upgrade in 7.3 this summer. After the Barcelona's Horizon's Users Group Meeting in May the migration path has been completely changed. Because our library runs a very old version of Horizon (5.3) we need to take a step forward.
The news about ROME did not find us very excited because the migration process is very painful and we are not very sure about how successful this will be.
Furthermore, we are thinking of migrating completely in a different vendor and this is Ex Libris with ALEPH 500.
Do you believe that this is a great step that does not worth it?
Has anyone of you any experience of both HORIZON and ALEPH?

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Permalink Reply by Bob Kosovsky on July 5, 2007 at 9:50am
Currently we are in the process of merging our two catalogs, one from Innovative Interfaces, the other Dynix. At the very least, since SirsiDynix has merged with a number of companies, they have experience in migrating databases. Even if you go with Rome, I predict that within 10 years, you'll need to migrate again. It's the nature of the changing world of the OPAC/ILS.
Permalink Reply by Sue Woodson on July 5, 2007 at 2:27pm
We're on Horizon 7.3 and so we have to migrate to some other system, too--ugh! We're going to wait for a bit, though and see what develops. We've some talk/interest in the open source ILS world. Evergreen http://open-ils.org/ and Koha http://www.koha.org/ both look very interesting. We don't have a huge systems dept for development but with these two we wouldn't need it.

By the way, they've renamed Rome. I want to say the new name is Symphony but I'm not 100% sure.

I agree with Bob K that the system you need for managing the library will be different 10 years from now. But while we'll still need/have library management systems, I suspect we won't even be talking about OPACs/ILSs and I pray we won't be trying to make do with ILSs by then. Why?

OPACs -- we're serving up a lot more than what's in the catalog so we're gonna need a bigger boat. (like Primo from Ex Libris or Encore from III)
ILSs -- they never were truly integrated. maybe we can build things that can be mashed up instead. mash your bib records with financial records?
Permalink Reply by Vera Kriezi on July 6, 2007 at 7:55am
Today I visited an academic library, here in Athens, of the National Technical University that has Aleph/Ex Libris.
The modules of Cataloging, Circulation and Serials/Acquisitions seemed very user-friendly and with no any special difficulty. Nice GUI, functional, stable, quick on retrievals and in general it was a "cute" ILS. The main problem though, as it came out from the discussion I had with system librarian, is that Ex libris does not have support office in Greece and all the work is done by the system administrator of the library that uses Aleph.
I don't know, it is a very difficult decision that we have to take.

The thought of an open source ILS like Evergreen or seemed tempting. I visited the website of Evergreen and I noticed that is like the commercial ILSs, with separate modules and an OPAC, of course.
It is not necessary to have an system dept that will support them?
In Greece there are no libraries yet that have an open source ILS. It is a little risky to be the pioneer...

I am seeing the migration to (dead) Horizon 7.3. as an unavoidable solution.
Permalink Reply by Bob Kosovsky on July 6, 2007 at 8:41am
We investigated Koha as well. From what I understand, the major downside for it is that support is rather expensive.
Permalink Reply by Vera Kriezi on July 25, 2007 at 2:54am
It is also very-very expensive and the budget does not allow us such a purchase.
So, as far as I am concerned the Aleph as a choice has plenty of disadvantages. Probably, we will stay in 5.3 for now and I will check KOHA and EVERGREEN as well.

ggk, thanks for the advice!
Permalink Reply by Scott Tarbox on July 25, 2007 at 10:28am
Having used Sirsi IBistro in a public library and Aleph at a community college library- I heartily endorse Sirsi products - Ex Libris seems to be stuck in a developmental rut that Sirsi conquered 10 years ago - no lie.
Permalink Reply by Erasmia on August 7, 2007 at 4:10am
Hi all
As a new Academic Library we now implementing the Horizon 8.0 but in a few months we are also going to migrate all the data to Rome.Before Horizon 8.0 we had Abekt and the data migration was done very easily without any problems. I believe that Horizon 8.0 is a lot more different than the previous versions and more reliable/flexible etc. so if you want you can go for it.
Aleph also is a very good solution but withoun any support in Greece. Horizon has support in Greece (InfoQuest).

have fun
Erasmia

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