Companies see platform upgrades, new leadership, and AI enhancements
By Marshall Breeding | May 1, 2025
The library technology industry showed its maturity in 2024. Businesses have become increasingly stable and robust products delivered rich functionality. But decades of consolidation have created a narrower slate of competitors, resulting in a smaller number of products available for each type and size of library. The marketplace is seeing more specialized solutions but fewer options.
Companies continue to tailor products to the diverging service needs and collections of public, academic, school, and special libraries. Library services platforms (LSPs) designed for academic libraries, for example, are not well suited for public libraries. This stratification further narrows customers’ choices.
The expectation is that a handful of established players will continue to drive sales and development of library management systems. But we can also expect an uptick in migrations, as many libraries continue to operate legacy systems that will soon need to be replaced. Outdated functionality and security concerns are driving these migrations, as libraries seek to shore up vulnerabilities in a climate of mounting cyberattacks.
While the main players haven’t changed, there is increasing demand for these big companies to develop additional layers of technology that efficiently address collection discovery, resource sharing, digital preservation and management, and community engagement. Companies must meet libraries’ growing expectations that technologies go beyond core systems.
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