Library Automation and Open Source Solutions Major Shifts & Practices: A Comparative Case Study of Library Automation Systems in India.

Abstract

Open source solutions have made their impact on areas of information knowledge and content management. Library automation system is one of the areas concerned to library community. It is a big challenge for the libraries when they select the automation product for their library, where one has to decide from various options available for the automation product such as commercial, non for profit and open source. The paper describes the observations and makes comparisons on the basis of discussion had with the library community using automation software in India. It also includes the information available in related literature. Features of library automation software, which are mostly in practice by libraries i.e. Libsys and SOUL, are compared with open source system KOHA.