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

[Duimovich, George]

Hello Dan,

We are doing what I think you're describing here: http://catalogue.nrcan.gc.ca

When you "Choose a library..." > Expand All you'll see these "branches" which we've labelled as "Specialized Collections"

	CANMET Publications
	Minproc
	Mintec

So when you select, say Minproc, etc., the search limiter for org unit changes to search "This Specialized Collection"... So for the user, we are using the Org Selector to simply highlight certain key locations/collections that we know they want to filter on. The Org Selector offers a great way to really highlight it and for us especially given our limited real estate on our site's institutional look & feel.

Amongst the drawbacks to this approach is that these special collections still carry some organizational unit "baggage" related to permissions management, policies and so on, but in our case I haven't seen this as much overhead. In the longer term, ideally we would expose this as a limiter and/or facet in the OPAC (better than what we can do now), but the Org Unit selector is currently the best way for us to give some visibility to these special collections.

IMHO, based upon the current OPAC design, the Org Selector offers the best way to filter by high profile collections associated with certain branches, but I would like to explore alternative options via facets on results, filters on search, etc.

Hope this helps..

George Duimovich
NRCan Library / Bibliothèque de RNCan
george.duimovich at nrcan.gc.ca
tel: 613.996.2101

 

-----Original Message-----
From: open-ils-dev-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org [mailto:open-ils-dev-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Dan Wells
Sent: September 3, 2009 10:00
To: open-ils-dev at list.georgialibraries.org
Subject: [OPEN-ILS-DEV] Taking the Plunge, Org Units

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