Discussion
Honestly, whoever makes decisions about the online infrastructure for public libraries in The Tron needs some help, with getting rid of the corporate Web 2.0 fleas that infest their website. I'm a card-carrying library member trying to login to;
https://hamiltonlibraries.co.nz/
From the moment I arrive on the landing page, I'm beset by scripts from dubious third-party domains (as identified by the NoScript plugin in my browser).
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@hindins
> they’re on the Kotui consortium
Certainly are, see the preceding thread.
> you’d need to talk to National Library which supply it
Somebody does. Ideally someone with some institutional clout. But if they need backup from a mouthy software freedom activist, I'm here for that ; )
@strypey @hindins I work in the library tech space. And yeah it sucks but paying money to companies overseas is just cheaper than the infrastructure and staffing you'd need to manage everything in-house / in New Zealand. (Assuming FOSS alternatives exist for everything - there's library infrastructure you don't mention which just doesn't have libre alternatives.) So you'd need to get the library budget dramatically increased to start with, and that's... not the direction library budgets usually go.
Also some kind of "are you human?" layer is 1000% necessary these days due to AI bots ruining everything, they *will* bring your site down on the regular like a ddos attack otherwise.
@zeborah just nudging gently back at your initial assertion about cost... if the National Library offered a company, like Catalyst IT, who also lead the global Koha development community and provide commercial onshore hosting, I'm quite sure you could get a better deal (& *way* faster service) than you'd get from Toronto. I know Ōtautahi's library services were slow as a wet week for years until they relatively recently shifted some hardware here. But at what cost? @strypey @hindins
@zeborah I suspect nobody's revisited the numbers over time, because, of course proprietary vendors like Bibliocommons or whatever Kotui uses build various sorts of lock-in into their service and make extremely hard/$$ to get out of, putting NatLib over a barrel (that many of us could've predicted). @strypey @hindins
@lightweight Across the library sector the numbers get revisited fairly constantly. (At an individual library maybe not because migrations are massive and if you've only just migrated your ILS in the last 10-15 years you probably don't want to migrate it again any time soon if you don't have to... but we still talk to each other and there's always someone looking around because it's been more like 30 years.) Koha is one thing that's probably relatively competitive with other ILSs, because it's solid software and obviously Catalyst has All The Expertise.
But an ILS isn't a discovery layer so if that's what you need (and that's what Sirsi Enterprise is) then the question gets more complex.
As for other software - there's one that I want to bring back from overseas so I've asked colleagues "Hey you self-host this, how about we pay you to host ours too?" and they say "Hell no" instantly. One of my colleagues talked to someone who apparently asked Catalyst about it and the price was apparently not ... "competitive" is a harsh word because there are strong benefits to Catalyst that make it value for money, but if it's money the library doesn't have it's not happening. Anyway that was third-hand and didn't come with the precise numbers so I guess I could contact them myself and ask for our case, but I hesitate to waste anyone's time because I really do know the landscape here Pretty Well.
And then there's some other software I want to bring in-NZ, and {stuff is being complex, vague toot is vague} but if/when we get to the point of actually asking around then Catalyst will definitely be one place we ask. Very happy to hear other names too. I expect the same answer but there are some differences that might change it: worth a try and all.
@zeborah thanks for that. Very helpful to have someone with insight. I've been talking to folks at CCPL for over a decade about this, and have been frustrated with their waffly responses the whole time. The beauty of 'libre'/open source is that if you make it better for anyone, you make it better for all, usually at minimal cost/free (it's cheaper as a SaaS provider to keep everyone on the same version). To me that's the real part the NatLib messed up. Proprietary's always dearer eventually.
@zeborah (and by 'you' in 'you make it better', you can be 'anyone' in the world, which is how Koha works, fittingly)
@zeborah it's been a while since I visited the global ILS tracker that counted implementations of different software around the world's libraries, but I'd be interested to know whether Koha or Bibliocommons (or whatever the real name of the system Kotui uses) is based on is prevalent. Given that more than a few entire countries around the world (Turkey?!) have deployed Koha nationwide, it does seem a real shame that the land of its birth & cultural home has given it the cold shoulder.
@zeborah I wonder if this rather topical thread might shed any light: https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@lightweight/117551373432104733
@zeborah
> I work in the library tech space
Thanks for your work. I know it's not as easy to do, as to carp about it from the outside. Nevertheless, I stand by the concerns that I'm raising, as important medium to long term planning considerations.
> paying money to companies overseas is just cheaper than the infrastructure and staffing you'd need to manage everything in-house / in New Zealand
That's a pretty broad brush claim, and I question whether it's true in 2026. I think it probably was fair comment a decade ago, when proprietary SaaSS was being heavily subsidised by copious Venture Capital, and DataFarming corporations running loss leaders to get more customers to lock-in. A *lot* has changed since then, both in the global tech industry, and in the onshore hosting market.
> there's library infrastructure you don't mention which just doesn't have libre alternatives
I'm happy to take your word for it. But that's a problem to be solved. One that's not going to be solved by shrugging our shoulders and continuing to give the lion's share of our public library funding to proprietary vendors. Particularly US corporations, given the techno-fascist direction they're now openly heading in.
> you'd need to get the library budget dramatically increased to start with
Which I absolutely support, and hope to see in the next term of government. Regardless of which talking head ends up as PM. Ideally some of that funding would be earmarked for addressing the kinds of data sovereignty and digital infrastructure sovereignty issues I'm raising.
> some kind of "are you human?" layer is 1000% necessary these days
Sure, but it doesn't have to be ClownFlare. It doesn't have to be SaaSS at all. Look at the Anubis software used by CodeBerg.org for that purpose;
Or the go-away software used by Nadeko.net;
https://dealing-with-bots.coar-repositories.org/tools/go-away/
FYI that site is specifically aimed at people running Open Access repositories, and well worth a look.
For a start, on every page they're helping Goggle spy on me, by making my browser run scripts from;
* googletagmanager.com
This domain serves scripts for Goggle Analytics. A DataFarming tool that can be replaced with privacy-respecting Free Code web analytics software, like Matomo and Plausible, Umami, and PostHog.
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Then when I go to the login page, my browser gets served scripts from;
* staticcdn.co.nz
Does a library website really need a third-party CDN? It could be getting thousands of visitors a day, so maybe it does. But who is this staticcdn.co.nz outfit? Could the scripts served from their domain not be served directly from the webserver at hamiltonlibraries.co.nz?
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Once I enter my Hamilton public library # and PIN to login and click 'submit' (a phrase I hate seeing on any button I'm expected to click), I'm served scripts from;
* sirsidynix.net.au
This is the Ozzie arm of SirsiDynix, the Weyland-Yutani of library software;
https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2009/11/11/open-source-advocates-reject-sirsidynixs-warning/
According to the Wikipedia article, SirsiDynix has its HQ in Utah, US, and it's currently owned by Harris Computer. A subsidiary of a Canadian company called Constellation Software. Who acquired it from another holding company, ICV Partners, after they acquired it from another holding company called Vista Equity Partners.
Is any of this *not* making your skin crawl?
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Clicking 'submit' redirects me to a completely different domain;
* ent.kotui.org.nz
This is an instance of the proprietary software supplied by Weyland-Yutani (see previous post). To add insult to injury, my login only succeeds if I run scripts from ClownFlare;
* challenges.cloudflare.com
... so they can check I'm human with their captcha.
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