Methodolgy and observations

I first searched lib-web-cats for all public libraries in the US running Evergreen or Koha. lib-web-cats lists total outlets, that is it includes separate listings for central libraries and branches. I convert these to systems and match them with U.S. public library systems from the NCES/NCLIS data. The "newkey" in Tables 2, 3, and 4 is the key variable for each library in that dataset. Although these data are the latest national-level data, they are for fiscal year 2005 so there is an asynchronous aspect to this analysis. On the one hand, these are universe data but on the other, they are a few years old. In the defense of this method, a library that had 14,000 circulations in FY 2005 is not going to have 140,000 this year: the numbers will be close enough for the purposes at hand.

Table 2 and Table 4 have summary data from libraries included by two methods of estimating Koha libraries.Those in Table 2 are the library systems which were actually running Koha on March 3 that I found by the method I discussed: I saw the Koha Web page. The equivalent count in in October was also 15. There was one new library added since then: John C. Fremont Library District in Colorado and one has dropped from the list: Delta Public Library in Delta, Ohio. According to the October spreadsheet I produced and distributed and from notes from January when I checked again, it was running Koha but is as of this moment running Follett Software. I asked Josh Ferraro about this matter at the VALE Symposium and he told me he didn't know. I may have made an error twice or Delta Public Library may have used Koha and is no longer.

Table 3 has the Evergreen libraries. These are all members of the PINES consortium. There were 47 members in October and 48 now.

Table 4 includes a larger list of library systems that are classified as Koha libraries. It came out of an objection that Josh Ferraro, President of LibLime had to the methodology I used in October. His argument was that LibLime had contracts with a number of systems that my method—I had to see Koha running on a Web-facing OPAC to count it—was too restrictive and although I thought he was wrong from an analytic standpoint, I added a new table and that includes all libraries listed by lib-web-cats as Koha libraries. lib-web-cats is a resource maintained by Marshall Breeding that allows one to analyze quickly which ILSs run on which libraries. It lists, as you can see on the pdf of this table, 81 systems of which, as we know, 15 run Koha. See the right column for the ILSs being run on March 3. There are more libraries on this list running iBistro and more without a Web-facing OPAC than are running Koha.It has 66 "Koha" libraries that do not run Koha and 15 that do. There were 69 systems in this category in October.

Adding these libraries to the estimate in Table 1 increases the count of libraries running or planning on an open source ILS but does not increase the percentages that much because the Koha libraries are so small. Howard County, as I mentioned in October, is the largest library in the Koha list, indeed, its totals are larger than the sum of all Koha libraries in Table 1.

Another interesting aspect of these libraries are those without Web-facing OPACs. If these are libraries that are not automated, this is really important work the LibLime folks are doing with these libraries.

lib-web-cats has no equivalent for libraries planning to implement Evergreen and I chose not to add any.

David Dorman of IndexData asked in October for an analysis of the number of instances of each of these products. That has turned out to be a great question. Of course, Evergreen today has one U.S. instance. All 48 systems and 275 libraries running Evergreen today are on one instance of Evergreen. Currently, Evergreen is the only ILS capable of running a large scale, distributed network like PINES.

How many instances of Koha are we looking at in Table 2? I received no authoritative answer to my email about this question. It appears to me that the six non-Pennsylvania libraries are in separate instances. The Pennsylvania libraries are all in the Crawford County Federated Library System which is apparently in the process of implementing a shared union catalog on the order of PINES, albeit a good bit smaller. The number of instances, then, is less than nine (because at least three appear to be on one instance). There are two Web-facing OPACs one, two at this time so CCFLS is in transition. Curiously, search returns on neither are deduped or grouped by format at this time. This is the first case I can find of Koha actually running a PINES-like consortium with a nascent union catalog.

The original spreadsheets are available on request.