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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