Heritage Library software

[gollops]

Hi,
I work in a small sixth form college Heritage was already installed here when the Librarian and I both started. Our Librarian is thinking of recommending that management scrap Heriatage and purchase Eclipse instead as she hates Heritage so much.She was wondering if anyone else out there uses heritage and what their opinions are of it.
Any opinions would be very useful

[linkazoid]

We use heritage here, but we dont have much involvement with it..

i dont know if the librian knows about eclipse or any other products out there..

He backs it up on his own onto a memory stick.. He seems to like it tho..

I can PM you his email and you could try to contact him, not sure if he would reply tho.. he avoids computers if he can. lol

[Sirbendy]

We use it...again, our librarian isn't that clued up. It's very powerful..but she only uses 1 or 2 functions. It's overkill IMHO, and the £500 a year service contract is not worth the use it gives us..

I've been lightly involved with it since it was "Bookshelf"..heh..and I've had to reinstall/upgrade and repair the damned DB so many times, it's not even funny. I scripted it to backup every night after the last time.

She only went and ballsed it up and then said "Oh..backup? No..."..we had to send it off on CDR to the makers and pay the piper to get it recovered.

TBQH, I've seen the missus write something not too dissimilar that's PHP and SQL based..it can't be that hard to do a book issue/track system...I've asked her to knock up a quick one for consumables for me..although she did one for a local college a few years back.

My opinion of it is:

Plusses:
It's good.
It's powerful.

Bad:
It's expensive
It feels cobbled together
The damned CLI narks me off
The DB narks me off (I mean, PICK..come on..Move with the times..)
The featureset is great, IF you use it..we only use the very basics, and would be much better served with a basic product.

All IMHO, of course.

[cookie_monster]

I generally find it to be a pain. At another school i worked at they had Alice and you could view the inventory from any client, with Heritage the Librarian was told that you need a licence for every connection to do that and it was very expensive.

[steve_nfi]

We use Heritage here. The Librarian seems content with it. The DB can screw up every now and then but our Librarian is quite good and backs it up every night.
I used Eclipse in my previous school and that seemed ok. Pretty simple to use, it had to be the librarian there was pretty simple. The backup facility was a bit beyond her though.

[Ric_]

We used to use Heritage... horribly buggy and overpriced support.

We have since moved to Eclipse .NET... horribly buggy but getting better and vastly more friendly to use.

Our librarians spent a great deal of time decided whether or not to switch but I think that they are glad they did. If you would like your librarian to speak to one of ours, PM me and I'll pass on the details - the whole library thing baffles me and they have weird words for things!

[browolf]

we've got heritage. it seems ok. the software is pretty oddly constructed. its broken a few times but the support is first class.

[gollops]

cheers everybody for the input