The hack in this case is the ability to modify and actually use the product though I’m sure there are plenty of ILS security problems out there as well. A recent post titled State of our ILS brought this up again and referred to the III ILS which I’ve also had the unfortunate fun of being stuck with. It’s luckily not my job to actually work on it, but I’ve taken on the spare-time project of reverse engineering as much of it as I can. I do this mostly because I can see various uses for the underlying information for the online courses. I also like to understand how things work so when I get a crazy idea I can tell how feasible it is.

Most of my ideas require the ability to easily get data out and possibly back in. As most people have probably found the ILS, regardless of vendor, usually lacks in this ability. Some vendors are changing but some don’t seem to even be considering it. I’ll save you from the rant about lock-in. Go read the post above, everything is said better than I could.

From code4lib:

Lowest karma: “voyager” (-109), “sirsi” (-88), and “iii” (-53)

I guess it could be worse.