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+1 On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 4:36 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > 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 >