[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] RE: Open-ils-general Digest, Vol 10, Issue 2

Thu Apr 5 14:14:32 EDT 2007

Jason, I'm an MLS who ended up being the systems person, by default, and
have been serving in that position for more than 5 years.  Open source
alternatives have been looking more attractive, since S/D dropped the
unwelcome Horizon/Unicorn/Rome news.  Currently, we are a Horizon ASP
customer.  I've been wondering if anyone is seeing a niche market there:
open source suppport + server/storage services?

I'm very glad you asked about academic and special libraries' needs--we
are a small national laboratory library and our users (scientists,
engineers, and administrative support staff) are more like those of an
academic library.  Our researchers are also able to check out a large
portion of our collection for as long as they need them (and can recall
items that others have had for at least 30 days).  In our previous ILS
and now in Horizon, we've never had a good way to handle that policy.
We often have overdues that aren't valid show up in the system.  

However, we are different from both academic and public in several ways:

1.  We do not fine our users for overdue items.  We don't need any of
the code that's written to handle fines.  Horizon has created some
hassles by blocking checkouts and not allowing us to simply delete the
fine.

2.  We circulate individual print serial issues (we do not bind issues).
Which also means that we barcode individual issues. 

We also need acquisitions and serials modules, though more and more of
our serials subscriptions are for electronic only.  I often wish for a
system that could check to be sure an issue is posted and accessible
(versus the traditional, "received in library")!

We are also interested in ease of data migration (since we just went
through that in Fall 2005).  Our data is (finally!) in MARC, about
40,000 bibs plus a very large set of authority records.

We are very interested in LDAP or an equivalent standard:  patron
recognition from initial login to the LAN would be very helpful to our
researchers.

Carol Fitzgerald
Library
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Golden, CO
carol_fitzgerald at nrel.gov

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Message: 2
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 13:22:26 +0930
From: "Peter Newman" <Peter.Newman at cdu.edu.au>
Subject: RE: academic libraries Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] 226 subscribers
To: <open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org>
Message-ID:

<21AD91B56BA911488DAB45EEDBF3AD2D011F9FAF at CDU-MAIL.cdu-staff.local>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="US-ASCII"

Hi Jason

Sorry I missed this email last week as I was sorting by subject to
monitor both the OPEN-ILS-DEV and OPEN-ILS-GENERAL lists in the one
folder and missed this email as it was sitting right up the top of them
all!

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head with the concept/feature
list.  Acquisitions with EDIFACT capability and Serials are functions
that are important here at CDU.  We pretty much currently use all 3
points you listed although the first 2 don't work particularly well from
an implementation point of view.  The 3rd we get daily extracts from
both staff and student systems which update the ILMS but we currently
haven't setup authentication to use a central service as it is
distributed across staff and student systems.  That means library portal
profiles are accessed using a barcode and pin which always causes some
confusion.

Other important functions are notices (for recalls, requests available
for pickup, pre-overdue and overdue items).  Then flexible reporting and
having them emailed automatically to particular people.  Since these are
already in Evergreen it would be a case of evaluating them to see if
that can meet current requirements (or to see if they can be improved
easily - an option for open source products).

Since we're in the midst of upgrading our ESX infrastructure - I've yet
been able to get access to a new machine to install Evergreen to start
:-(.

Another thing is how well can Evergreen handle importing large amounts
of marc data?  Say ~22000 records and being able to match bib/item ids
or use LDR format for matching and deleting marc records?

These are the things I want to test anyway :-)

Regards
Pete

-----Original Message-----
From: open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org
[mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of
Jason Etheridge
Sent: Thursday, 29 March 2007 6:10 PM
To: open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org
Subject: academic libraries Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] 226 subscribers

On 3/29/07, Peter Newman <Peter.Newman at cdu.edu.au> wrote:
> All our servers here run on VMWare ESX infrastructure

Very cool.  I'm a big vmware fan, though I've never used it for servers.

> Are there many academic institutions running Evergreen?

There isn't.  The only live in-production instance of Evergreen
currently is with the PINES consortium and its 265 public libraries,
though I don't expect that to remain true for very long. :)  There's
certainly academic interest and some volunteer contributors from
academic institutions, and recently the Georgia Public Library Service
has partnered with the University of Windsor to develop an
acquisitions/serials module.

I'd like to see Evergreen support not only academic libraries, but mixed
consortia where you have academic, public, and special libraries.  With
that thought, I'd like to pick some brains and see how some academic
needs and concepts might map to public libraries and/or Evergreen.  I'll
throw out a few that come to my mind, and you guys can correct me if I
misinterpret any of them, and add any others you can think of.

1) Recalls.  Basically, you can have someone like a Professor borrow an
item indefinitely, until someone else wants the item, at which point the
Professor gets notified and is supposed to return the item.
This is probably do-able under the hood now, though there isn't
interface support for it currently.  We basically create a hold type of
Recall and let it trigger such actions as emailing the current borrower,
and maybe resetting the due date for the existing circulation.

In fact, I think PINES could use something like this.  PINES policy says
Staff don't accrue late fees for items they have out, though technically
they still have due dates.  A Recall could be an easy way of getting a
specific item back from Staff.

2) Reserves.  Basically, materials are set aside (by say, a Professor)
to be used by a specific group of people (maybe everyone taking a
particular course or class).  One way this could be done today is by
creating a shelving/copy location of Reserves (maybe one for each
course) for a library and giving it default properties of Non
Circulating and Non Holdable for items in that location.  Then it would
be a matter of putting patrons/students into certain permission or
profile groups for those courses making use of reserves, and having the
circ rules make exceptions when it encounters those.  For example, a
shelving location of Reserves - Math 101 is non circulating to students
by default, but if a student is a member of the Math 101 Reserve group,
then the circ rules will allow them to circulate an item from that
location.  What we're missing today is an easy GUI for such group and
circ rule manipulation.

3) External patron file/data.  This came up in a talk recently;
basically some libraries would like to
feed/create/update/synchronize/etc. the ILS patron records with
information from a central/external patron database (from say, the
Registrar's office), and maybe go in the other direction as well (the
school's account for a student could get flagged if the student has
unresolved issues at a library).  This is doable, and was basically done
in PINES with the migration of Patron data from the old system to
Evergreen.  In general, given any consistently formatted (and keyed or
indexed) data, we can map that data into Evergreen.

Does anything else come to mind?

Thanks!

--
Jason Etheridge
GPLS -- PINES Development
http://open-ils.org/

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