Monday, June 15, 2009

New Tools, New Workflows (Melissa Belvadi, UPEI)

Melissa Belvadi is the Emerging Technologies and Metadata Librarian at UPEI, and as such gets to work in a library committed to rethinking all library processes and systems from the ground up. In this presentation, she described the workflows and tools they ended up with when they gave up a good number of their proprietary tools for OpenSource software: in short, they replaced their (SIRSI) ILS/OPAC with Evergreen, and started working with the knowledgebase CUFTS and the OpenURL resolver Godot for their serials management.

Since Evergreen does not accommodate serials or acquisitions, there were a few notable hiccups. In the end, they are managing their serials in CUFTS (Bib records, you say? Dump 'em, they answer!) and tracking acquisitions in Excel spreadsheets, keeping only the fields that the acquisitions staff felt were really necessary.

One workflow decision that elicited strong reactions form the crowd was the decision to involve liaison librarians in the cataloguing process. (UPEI has a very experienced copy cataloguer, but no dedicated person for original cataloguing.) In the case of locally published items for which no records exist, librarians are responsible for identifying subject headings and a call number. The copy cataloguer then puts together the record in proper MARC format. Currently only a few librarians are participating in this process.

Probably my favourite solution is how they have tied the interlibrary loan request form to their OpenURL resolver. When the student fills out the very simple online form (not the form supplied with ASIN), the Resolver checks to make sure that the article is indeed not available before submitting the request (genius!).

>> Click here to download Melissa's slides.

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