[OPEN-ILS-DEV] SPAM: Serials Management and the Collaborative Itch

[Mark Leggott]

Hi all - I have been waiting to send this post for some time now and  
cleaning up the basement after Hanna's tail yesterday seemed as good a  
time as any :-)

The University of PEI recently moved to Evergreen, going live in June.  
Aside from the reasons many of you subscribe to re the advantages of  
open source, we also wanted to look at opportunities to transform the  
workflow here at Robertson Library. For us, that meant the absence of  
a serials module was a good thing as it made us look at what we were  
doing and why. The end result was a migration of our serials functions  
to the open source linker CUFTS/GODOT (also moving linker functions  
away from the OCLC Openly product). CUFTS/GODOT is one of the  
excellent open source products from the Library at Simon Fraser  
University in B.C. (must be something in the water in B.C. to create  
such a hotbed of OS activity) and one with a large user base.

Like many academic institutions, 95% of our journal titles are  
electronic and CUFTS' combined linker/ERM (Electronic Resource  
Management) modules were perfect for the digital stuff. We bit the  
bullet and migrated all our print holdings to the CUFTS knowledgebase  
after the talented programmer on the project made a few changes to the  
code to accommodate special requirements for print, such as a local  
holdings field, print holdings notes field, etc. The end result is a  
serials management tool that provides us with almost all that we need:  
package management for all our digital titles; acquisitions and other  
management functions for packages, including our print vendor; the  
ability to discover resources from print and digital holdings; the  
ability to seamlessly display what we have from both; the ability to  
"check-in" print titles using the summary holdings field and special  
notes. We are also redefining our management of print holdings to  
reflect the realities of 2008. We no longer check-in any title that we  
have access to digitally and we are reviewing our binding and print- 
only check-in policies with a mind towards not doing any of it.

All this by way of a suggestion: the Evergreen community should look  
at "grafting" CUFTS onto Evergreen to provide a tighter connection  
between the 2 and also use it as the default serials module, rather  
than rebuilding a new one from scratch. The code is excellent, tried  
and tested, and part of a growing international community making use  
of the CUFTS/GODOT infrastructure. Like at UPEI, CUFTS could be used  
out of the box to provide much of what one needs for a simpler  
approach to serials management, but there are a few things that could  
be done to make it a bit better: synchronization with the Evergreen  
bib database so whenever changes are made to serials records in CUFTS  
they are mirrored in the OPAC; more granular print holdings info for  
more accurate discovery; a link between the CUFTS ERM and the upcoming  
acquisitions module, etc.

One could also think a little more creatively and not sync changes  
between the 2, but rather enable both databases into a search from the  
OPAC - in other words searching in the OPAC would conduct a search on  
both Evergreen and CUFTS at the same time, mashing results back to the  
user. Adding a "federated search" capability into the Evergreen front- 
end would have benefits elsewhere as well. One of the compelling  
features of Evergreen for us was the modular architecture - in fact I  
would argue that Evergreen already provides a nice OLE-like  
architecture for building modular library frameworks, so why not show  
how it can be done?

We found the opportunity to question how we were doing things in a  
tight timeframe (we moved to Evergreen in 5 weeks) both daunting and  
exhilarating at the same time, especially when it came to "What do we  
do without a XXX module?" Highly recommended :-)

So, how about it? Would this work for other academic institutions  
looking to make the switch to Evergreen? What else would you need not  
currently in CUFTS? And please don't say predictive algorithms for pre- 
populating check-in records for print issues - those things don't work  
well in any ILS product and who needs them 2 years from now anyway?

Mark


Mark Leggott, University Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
550 University Ave. Charlottetown, PE C1A 4P3
902-566-0460  Fax 902-628-4305
m.leggott at upei.ca