Folks -
I am just now looking over all the posts and I thank you all for the valuable information. It's not likely that I will lose my job over this, as we have been shrinking though attrition for years now and all it takes is for two people to call in sick to make it hard to staff the library desks, so I am needed if for no other reason than to provide a warm body to answer patron questions like "where's the books on butterflies?" and such. If the library wants to pay me to sit and answer dumb questions, then hey - it's their dime. Customer service is important, too.
The ease of which pfsense is installed and managed should be a great selling point to my supervisor when she realizes that she won't be able to make a cisco configuration change by pointing and clicking a mouse on a web page, but rather has to call up the firm that installed the Ci$co firewall to do it, then charge us for the change.
Since the starting of this topic, the director of the library has seen the report on the state of our network that the consultants have concocted. He has (correctly) come to the realization that it's a sales tool first and foremost, and that we, my boss and I, get to decide what proposals we feel will work for our organization, not the consultants. That's a relief.
We are doing battle with another outside firm right now over a web tool they wrote for us that is failing miserably, so it might leave management with a bad taste in it's mouth for contractors.
Again - thanks to all who contributed to this conversation. It will be useful to me.
LibraryMark