Digital Spaces and Opting Open Source Software: Issues and Challenges for Indian Libraries

The growth and development of software domain has been changed dramatically over the past two decades. The working environment of libraries turn more collaborative and service oriented. There has been unimaginable largeness in knowledge and information and the documents in which it is recorded hence inducing their management more complex and composite over the years. Library professionals need to be molded accordingly to tackle the new technological challenges to manage the ever-growing information industry. Library automation is one such area where the application of rapidly evolving technologies are being implemented and practiced to better handle the resources and to serve their users. Selection and use of suitable library automation tools are one of the crucial steps to be focused by the library professionals, which sometimes demand the confluence of librarian and IT experts. The study examines the perceptions of library professionals towards some of the major aspects in adopting integrated library systems available both in proprietary as well as open source streams. A survey among selected library professionals in India using any of the automation software was carried out to collect the primary data. The final analysis shows that Open Source Integrated Library Systems (OSILS) are more suitable for long term use as they are being featured with a strong research and development support and developed over many years in a collaborative manner supplement with frequent updates, hence can have more advanced and updated features for long term sustainability