Three Takeaways for Academic Libraries from the 2025 Library Systems Report 

Marshall Breeding offers insights into the library systems market

Posted on May 12, 2025 in Blog Posts

Spring doesn’t officially begin until independent library consultant Marshall Breeding publishes his Library Systems Report in American Libraries. The report covers for-profit and nonprofit organizations that create library research products, particularly library system platforms and integrated library systems, and draws on survey data from a wide array of vendors. (Check out our past coverage of the 2023 and 2024 reports.) Breeding’s report spans the full spectrum of vendors, both domestic and abroad, so we wanted to draw out the key takeaways of the report for research and academic libraries about the state of the market. 

📄 Read Breeding’s full report. 

---

📊 The market reflects the trade-offs of industry consolidations 

Last year’s report distilled quite nicely into a single line: “In the absence of major business moves and acquisitions, companies set their sights on executing strategies to strengthen their market position.” In the opening lines of this year’s report, Breeding makes a similar observation about the strength of current vendors, but he gives it a noticeably different slant: 

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. 

In short, the market is beginning to register the trade-offs of consolidation and strong organizational positions. Vendors may be doing well, but consumers have fewer and increasingly specialized options to choose from. In Breeding’s view, big companies are likely to continue to do well this year, and many libraries will migrate to them to replace legacy systems and shore up institutional cybersecurity concerns. 

---

🔥 Stay up-to-date with LibTech Insights by signing up for our free newsletter. Just one weekly email with our new blog posts, top tech news stories, and other bonus content. Check out some posts from our archive:

• OLMoTrace: An AI That’s Transparent about Its Training Data
• 5 Quick Tests to Run on Your Library Website
• Web Archiving Made Easy: Saving a Website Snapshot with Zotero

🚨 Last call to register for LTI’s upcoming webinar on AI tools for enhancing library workflows on Thursday, May 22 at 2 PM (EST).

---

🏃‍♂️ Open-source systems are gaining traction 

Open-source library systems have faced some push and pull over the past couple of years. In 2022, the Library of Congress announced its decision to migrate to EBSCO’s open-source platform FOLIO, which seemed to signal a major shift in the market. However, other big-name institutions, including Duke, Yale, and NYU, opted for proprietary library system platforms or abandoned open-source platforms.  

In this year’s report, Breeding notes that EBSCO signed an impressive 159 contracts for FOLIO in 2024. One can’t help but notice that, save for Columbia University, the other institutions that Breeding names, including Virginia Military Institute and Southern New Hampshire University, are smaller in stature and influence. It may be hard to take this number, though significant, as a bellwether for open-source systems. 

🧠 AI “disruption” isn’t what customers want 

“Move fast and break things” might be the motto of tech start-ups, but it doesn’t reflect the realities of library work. Breeding has anticipated the rise of AI-integrated systems since his 2023 report—a prediction that has been slow to materialize (which isn’t to say that it’s become less likely). Though he continues to posit that the integration of AI into library systems “will come at full speed,” he also inserts a point of caution. Yes, generative AI might make tasks like creating descriptive metadata a breeze, but only if it’s accurate. Even small, occasional errors on an institutional scale can accumulate into big headaches. 

Breeding predicts that businesses that can harness AI and do so well will quickly secure a competitive advantage in the field. These AI-integrated offerings may also come as a relief to libraries facing fewer resources within the current social and political climate. 

➡️ Read Breeding’s full report in American Libraries. 

Related Posts