---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2013 02:10:34 -0700 (PDT) From: Subbiah Arunachalam <subbiah_a@yahoo.com> At last people are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel! Many institutions have squandered public funds - all coming from taxpayers - on commercially marketed software when excellent software is available for free. Prof. ARD Prasad, Director of DRTC at ISI, B'lore, has been advocating the adoption of open source software for years but barring a few others have ignored his recommendation. Yes, go for KOHA. There is a worldwide community of KOHA users and you can always learn from each other.� SA ________________________________ From: ARAGONDA L MOORTHY <almoorthy52@gmail.com> To: Swati Bhattacharyya <swati@iimcal.ac.in> Cc: Dr. Rama K C Patro <rkcpatro@iimtobu.ac.in>; lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Sent: Thursday, 28 March 2013, 14:06 Subject: Re: [LIS-Forum] kindly mail 2 forum members Dear ALL, This is reg LibSys. We too faced problems in using the software in 2005-06 at DRDL, Hyderabad. We switched over from Libris to LibSys. For data export, they took enormous time. The Engineer who visited DRDL, Hyderabad took data on CD to facilitate export of OPAC data. But after 6 months expressed inability to export saying some lame excuse. Again they took the data and took more time. Meanwhile I joined DESIDOC in 2006, and was able to call their senior executives to solve the problem. All this took more than 1 year. Again they charge exorbitantly for maintenance. I understand it has the largest customer base in India and so they are dictating term (Monopoly). LIS professionals have to unitedly take on such issues raising in National Forums like Conferences, etc. Whenever we suggest a new facility--utility--improvement, they take and improve the software. But our intellectual capital (suggestions/improvements) do not get any rewards. The are used to bring new release with increased price tag. Why can't we use KOHa or NEWGENLI--the open source software???? AL MOORTHY