We used to. Until a few years ago, we had a quite wonderful electronic library catalogue system developed by a University employee. It could do anything you want, including sending you reminder emails at specifyable days before your loan expired. And if something was missing, you sent an email to the local developer and your wishlist was added soon. Then, all of a sudden, the University bureaucracy decided that perfectly functional, well-understood and highly optimized self-written software was an anachronism, unsuitable for a 21st century educational institution. Everything had to be off-the-shelf software.

So the University threw out their wonderful own developments and replaced not only the library catalogue, but also the central accounting system, the system for working out budgets for grant proposals, the student database, and others with “commercial off-the-shelf” solutions. In all cases, the results have been embarrasing desasters, to put it mildly. In the case of the new 10-million-pound accounting system (originaly called CAPSA, now after a lot of bad press renamed into UFS) designed and configured for the University by Oracle, the University almost came to a grinding halt for weeks because of its bugs. Experienced employees came literally in tears out of training seminars where they started to realize what a hell of defunct Java applets their working day would be from now on. Many of the problems still have not been fixed and workflows have become far more complex and inflexible. If you don’t like the new Voyager cataloging system, you haven’t even scratched the surface yet of how much the quality of our services has suffered in the last five years after fine local software products were replaced with ware from the other side of the pond.