A semi-recent post at IT Garage that pointed to a related presentation and an article at Linux Journal kind of sums up what I see happening in some libraries and with the code4lib community.

What I've found is an increasing reliance on personal and development community initiative and the freedom and trust making that possible. In sum, what I'm seeing is a do-it-yourself movement in companies everywhere, a growth in self-reliance I'm calling Do-It-Yourself IT (DIY-IT).

If you follow many of the library related blogs, especially the ones listed on Planet Code4Lib, then you’ve probably seen this shift as well. More and more libraries are building what they need in house. This doesn’t mean no vendor solutions but definitely not 100% turnkey. As the article quotes:

You can't do everything with building blocks from vendors. They pretend they're selling you a prefab building and they're not. They're selling you pipes and fittings and stuff to put it together. In reality, to build an enterprise, you have to have a set of experts in your IT shop who can put it all together. Certainly, historically you need a lot of expertise to get anything done, because this stuff really isn't easy to put together. But if you've been led by the vendors to believe that everything dovetails together nicely, like you see in the .Net ads, or in any major marketing campaign that promises nirvana, you've got a problem.

Some libraries are starting to piece things together and are sharing it with the community at large. There are also open-source based solutions becoming available which will offer even more choices and for those with the expertise at hand, maybe a little easier to implement and change.

But the problem comes about that not everyone has the expertise available and rely solely on vendors for solutions. How bad this is is dependent on your DIY mindset. There are plenty of people that depend on their dealership to keep their car going and have no plans on ever doing things themselves. As said above, many of these things aren’t simple. At librarycamp this topic came up again and again and the possible solutions to this problem aren’t necessarily simple either. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately and I’ll hopefully be posting quite a bit on my thoughts soon. Until then I recommend reading Blyberg’s thoughts on the matter.