Five Colleges, Incorporated: New Library Catalog

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Welcome to a Forward-Looking New Library Catalog

(from the Fall 2006 issue of Ink Newsbreaks)

The library is the heart of the campus, so it's big news when a new library system is installed. This fall, as faculty and students returned to campus, they were greeted by an integrated, automated system that reflects some of the latest technological refinements available on the market today.

What does this system offer users that the old one did not? "The biggest change," observes Amherst College Librarian Jan Jourdain, "is that for the first time in twenty years, users can now search all four college collections and that of the University in a single command." Jourdain, who served as project manager for the installation, added that it also provides many more options for searching by format—film and videos, DVDs, and archival materials. To illustrate, she mentions carrying out searches on music numbers: "Doing a search using the publishing number for a recording will be much easier now," she points out, and "searching for a keyword in a DVD will yield a list of DVDs and where they are held."

Jay Schafer, director of libraries for the UMass Amherst campus, agrees. Having "the union view," Schafer thinks, "represents a big step forward. To see all the holdings at one time is something we have aspired to for a long time, but the technology was just not there. Now it is." Among the advantages the new system offers, he says, is "greater sophistication for the user in handling foreign language searches, having the option of setting up personal accounts to receive notification about acquisitions in a particular subject area, and being able to save previous searches as a time-saving measure."

From the viewpoint of library staff, Jourdain says, the new system makes data more "portable." Because data can be stored in a more conventional way, she explains, "it is more accessible to a wide variety of tools, making it easier to connect with local systems like Datatel, Banner, and others."

"In short," says Gai Carpenter, Hampshire College librarian and the senior member of the Five College Librarians Council, "the new system allows us to create many more kinds of access than we've had previously with the other systems."

Carpenter has been through three iterations of the integrated catalog. The first one, introduced in 1983, she says, "allowed us to become automated in the first place." The second, installed in 1993-1994, brought in some new "functionality," including the "get" function that enables users to request a book from one of the libraries.

About four years ago, Carpenter says, after a decade with Innovative Interfaces, the Five College Librarians began conversations about whether to upgrade the existing system or go over to an entirely new one. Significant advances in ILS technology, coupled with nearing the end of an expected ten-year life span for the existing system, led to the decision, she says, to form a "window shopping" committee charged with exploring what options were on the market and recommending a course of action.

In a report to the council in March 2002, the committee identified a number of key trends and assumptions operating industry-wide in ILS today, including an increasing emphasis on new standards (e.g., Unicode and EDIFACT), and the need for access to a wide variety of resources through one interface. Patrons' expectations today range from a desire for "one-stop shopping" for information with cross platform, multi-format searching capability to integration with other campus information services (e.g., course management systems, image databases). Given the rapidly changing nature of technologies in today's market, the report concluded that "flexibility is key in all areas—not just among ourselves in the process of envisioning a new system but also in the ability of the system itself to change and adapt to the future."

The choice of Ex Libris, a recognized worldwide developer and provider of applications for the world's top libraries, was based in part on its flexibility, says Carpenter, and "it's a standards-driven system, which uses Unicode to represent any number of international scripts and provides protocols for such languages as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean." It is currently in use among 70 of the leading universities worldwide and in 45 of the top-ranked universities in North America, including Harvard, Duke, MIT, the State University of New York (SUNY) system, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Maryland.

The real sophistication of the new system, however, lies at "the back end" of the operating system. According to Jourdain, that sophistication will do a lot to help library staff get their jobs done more efficiently: "Back-office operations are simplified considerably. It will help us do electronic transactions such as acquisitions in a more streamlined way," she says.

The system debuted without a hitch on Monday, August 28, when Ex Libris was officially up and running. "A core group of dedicated people did a lot of work to make this happen," says Jourdain.

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