[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] online libraries

[Howell, Lynda]

Tara,

Thanks for your response.  We are sort of an unusual library!

We have about 90,000 books, 6,000 dissertations/theses, and a small scattering of other materials in our catalog (currently using EOS.Web).  All of our books and other materials, and most of our dissertations/theses, are electronic and accessed online - mostly from ebrary, ProQuest, and EBSCO.  Our journals (also all electronic) aren't in the catalog at this point.  We have a few print theses, but they're basically in storage and don't circulate.   We do have a physical office for our staff, but there's no physical "library".

So all of our materials are accessed through the web.  There's nothing to check out, and authentication for EZProxy is done through an institutional database we don't maintain.  This means we don't need patron records and nothing can ever be overdue.  We do have a few books that are accessible by only a limited number of people at a time, but that's handled through ebrary's interface, and we couldn't set up holds, etc. in an ILS if we wanted to.  We do circulate physical materials we borrow through ILL, but do so through ILLiad.

Our OPAC, therefore, is simply a tool to help people find out what we have access to.  Once they find it, they need to be able to click on a URL and go off to the vendor site to read it.   It's helpful to have a second screen of more information about a given book for people who want it, but we don't want everyone to always have to click from the search results to a full display screen before they can go to the full text.

In our current system, we just ignore the patron/circulation and serials functions, and have used CSS to hide some of the OPAC options we don't want users to click on but can't actually disable.  But we're always aware that the ILS was designed for a physical collection, and fear that we're losing out by using it in ways it really wasn't designed.  Another issue is that we would like to be able to offer a quick way to include or exclude the student-created works (theses/etc.) in searches.  EOS.Web, and most other systems I've seen, have the ability to limit to particular categories/formats, but not to exclude particular ones - workarounds include creating a variety of "everything but X" categories to limit to, but that gets tricky to maintain.

Does that help?

Lynda.

From: open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org [mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Tara Robertson
Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2012 1:03 PM
To: Evergreen Discussion Group
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] online libraries

Hi Lynda,

I'm not able to fully imagine what kinds of collections your library has and how you do things.

I'm in a small university library and we just loaded a bunch of MARC records for ebooks and database titles (which link to our ERMS where students actually connect through to journal article databases where they can search for articles). We have some digital collections that are not in our catalogue (they were in MDID and are now in CONTENTdm)--we don't have any pointers for those collections in our catalogue.

Can you tell us a bit more information about your library and how things work?

Cheers,
Tara
On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 8:01 AM, Howell, Lynda <Lynda.Howell at myunion.edu<mailto:Lynda.Howell at myunion.edu>> wrote:
I'm interested in hearing from anyone using Evergreen in an online (only) library.  The whole concept of circulation (patrons, # of copies, due dates, holds, availability, fines, etc.) isn't relevant to us, and 1-click access to full text from the search results page is essential.  Being able to limit searches to particular subsets (or to exclude particular subsets) is also important to us.  We're starting to explore open-source options for replacing our current ILS.

Is anyone using Evergreen in this kind of environment?  What kinds of customization did you do initially, and how much on-going work are you finding it takes to keep up with upgrades?  What other ILS/OPACs did you consider before choosing Evergreen, and what made you go with Evergreen?

Thanks for any insights you can give.

Lynda Howell

--------------------------------
Lynda Howell
Systems Librarian
Union Institute & University
62 Ridge Street, Suite 2
Montpelier, Vermont 05602
(802) 828-8618<tel:%28802%29%20828-8618>
lynda.howell at myunion.edu<mailto:lynda.howell at myunion.edu>


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