Success and abandonment of OSS library management systems

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to study the open source library management systems (LMSs) and to find the present development. The development and community activity is studied by examining ‘release activity’ and ‘mailing list /discussion forum activity by applying different the methodologies. Other aspects of open source library management systems such as longevity, features, license, documentation, technology used are also studied. It is found that out of 31 open source library management systems only 15 systems are currently active. Maximum active open source LMSs have institutional support. Fifty per cent of LMS project are inactive or abandoned. This study covers success and abandonment aspects of open source LMSs and provides current status open source library management systems.