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

[Mark Leggott]

Hi Geoff - we are actually not syncing right now, as we would like to  
get a better sense of which of these approaches makes the most sense.

I am much more enamored of the "OPAC federated search" approach than I  
am of syncing everything to the bib database: thinking about syncing  
in terms of eJournals can be contemplated, but what about when you add  
others like government documents, or other collections that we used to  
add to the bib database when they were in our print collections - it  
starts to get hairy.

We are starting to get a little further into the Evergreen code (or at  
least our new programmer, Alexander O'Neill is) and it is not  
necessarily hard to imagine doing a mash-up: query the Evergreen DB  
and the CUFTS DB, bring the results back and present them in grouped  
sections (e.g. journals and monographs in separate tabs or display  
groups) - or maybe as facets. Lots of possibilities - especially with  
a system like Evergreen that allows you to get under the hood!

I also agree 100% on the change in workflow to focus on eJournals - if  
you have something like what we've described here then you don't need  
to mirror them in the OPAC...

Mark

On 8-Sep-08, at 11:55 AM, Geoff Sinclair wrote:

> Mark Leggott wrote:
>> 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?
>
> I like this approach because it's cleaner conceptually, but what  
> about the performance considerations (both response time and search  
> functionality)? And, since you're already syncing now, have you  
> built a real-time feed, or are you doing a nightly batch?
>
> More generally, we plan to shift our systems and workflows to focus  
> primarily on e-journals, reducing the time and money spent on print,  
> and we believe this will benefit our patrons. Our e-journal holdings  
> aren't even in our OPAC, but, through some customization, we have  
> managed to get our print and microfilm holdings into our OpenURL  
> resolver (SFX). I wonder if having 5% of our journals in the OPAC is  
> worse than having none at all...understandably, our patrons have a  
> hard time understanding where to go to find our resources.
>
> Geoff
>
> -- 
> Geoff Sinclair
> Manager of Technical Services
> Education Centre Library, Nipissing University / Canadore College
> Tel: 705-474-3450 x4439
> E-mail: geoffs at nipissingu.ca
> Web: http://www.eclibrary.ca