[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Taking the Plunge, Org Units

[Dan Wells]

Hello all,

Well, after a few years of hanging around and helping where I could, I am pleased to announce that Calvin College is now officially committed to making the switch to Evergreen!  At one time it seemed that it would never happen, and suddenly it seems to be happening too fast :)

We have quite a bit of experience with installing the system, loading bib records, and transferring patron records, so I think we are in a good position.  We are now turning our attention to defining a usable and useful organizational hierarchy.  Having just one library, it would seem that this feature doesn't really apply to us, but since it seems so flexible, we are hoping to put it to use.

With that in mind, does it make sense to define "collections" at the org_unit level?  For instance, we are a government documents repository for our district.  Does it make sense to define a separate unit for this collection within (underneath) the library unit?  It seems that we could gain some additional OPAC and permissions granularity by doing so, but do we lose anything in the process?  Would it create more additional work than it is worth?  A breakdown of our library along these lines will probably mean 5 or 6 collection units and possibly another 5 or 6 sub-collections.  

I have many more questions, but for the sake of clarity of thread I will stop there.

Thank you very much for any help and opinions you can provide.

Dan


*********************************************************************************
Daniel Wells, Library Programmer Analyst dbw2 at calvin.edu
Hekman Library at Calvin College
616.526.7133