Jim, I'd seriously consider signing this letter in the form of a petition.
Luisa Ms. Luisa Cywinski Team Leader, Access Services Falvey Memorial Library Villanova University 800 Lancaster Avenue Villanova, PA 19085 610-519-5215 CONFIDENTIALITY: This email (including any attachments) may contain confidential, proprietary and privileged information, and unauthorized disclosure or use is prohibited. If you received this email in error, please notify the sender and delete this email from your system. ________________________________________ From: arie-l-boun...@mailman2.u.washington.edu [arie-l-boun...@mailman2.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of James Martin Cummings [j.cum...@usciences.edu] Sent: Friday, November 11, 2011 2:30 PM To: arie-l@u.washington.edu Subject: [ARIE-L] Open letter to Infotreive: Release Ariel as Open Source From: James Martin Cummings Sent: Friday, November 11, 2011 1:11 PM To: Charles Myers Cc: Michael J. Krasulski Subject: To Vet - Open letter to Infotreive: Release Ariel as Open Source I have been using Ariel to receive and send documents since I started in ILL in 2005. When I started, almost every document that I received came through Ariel (though there was a higher proportion of FAXes and regular mail hardcopy articles). In other words, Ariel had complete market dominance. That first year 3.4 was released and then an update. Since that time, there has been almost no support for Ariel; there has been no software upgrade, there has been minimal support from Infotreive. In 2006, when my school decided to go from hardcopy delivery of articles received in Ariel to using the web server, there was no support from Infotreive phone calls were never returned; to finally get it set up we had to get help from another library. The state of Ariel is woeful. Not a week (sometimes not a day) goes by without an “we are dropping Ariel” announcement on the Ariel listserve. For five years, you have ignored this product which was a central part of the resource sharing technology. No one can get help. The software is never upgraded. It is time to stop pretending that you will ever service Ariel. It is time to release the source code for Ariel so that we users (or our programmer co-workers) can upgrade and troubleshoot Ariel. I have had to learn to live with not being able to rotate a page in a scanned document because Ariel will likely crash and this means that I will completely lose the document (of course now we just do it with Odyssey). I have had to live with entering every patron I deliver to by hand because the address book import does not work (if you make a typo in an email address there is no way to find out without the patron complaining). I invite the listserve to join me in this call. Jim Cummings Interlibrary Loan Borrowing Assistant J. W. England Library 4200 Woodland Ave University of the Sciences in Philadelphia Philadelphia, PA 19104-4495 215-596-8969 215-596-8760 FAX DOCline/OCLC: PAUPPS/PCP Ariel: ariel.usp.edu Odyssey: illiad.usp.edu j.cum...@usciences.edu<mailto:j.cum...@usciences.edu> | www.usciences.edu<http://www.usciences.edu/> USciences: Where healthcare and science converge. _______________________________________________ ARIE-L mailing list Mail the list at ARIE-L@u.washington.edu Unsubscribe at http://www.arie-l.org#subscribers Archive at http://www.mail-archive.com/arie-l@u.washington.edu/ Scanner recommendations at http://shareill.org/index.php?title=Ariel_Scanners
