Greetings!

I have been lurking on (or ignoring) this forum for years.  And libraries too.  Some of you may know me.  I am the Avanti guy.  I am, perhaps, the first person to try to produce an open source ILS back in 1999, though there is a David Duncan out there who tried before I did. I was there when all this stuff was coming together.

Since then I have seen a lot of good things happen.  There's Koha.  There's Evergreen.  They are good things.  I have also seen first hand how libraries get screwed over and over by commercial vendors with their crappy software.  I believe free software is the answer to that.  I have neglected Avanti for years, but now I am ready to return to it.

I want to get back to simple things.  Imagine if there were no Marc records.  Minimal layers of abstraction.  No politics.  No vendors.  No SQL straightjacket.  What would an ILS look like without those things?  Sometimes the biggest prison is between the ears.

I am in a position to do this now, and that's what I have decided to do.  I am getting busy.

Peter Schlumpf