Library Systems

LITS Annual Report  2003-2004

I began working for Mount Holyoke College in September of 2003. From then until July 2004, the end of the period of annual reporting, my work centered mainly on project work such as the implementation for the Interlibrary Loan department of ILLiad for ILL. ILLiad is a set of sofware that automates many aspects of the ILL process for a library. It also allows the easy creation of reports on ILL statistics as well as the ablility to give users of the ILL system a status on all of their requests. This project was fully implemented for the start of the spring semester for 2004. It has provided many efficiencies for both staff of the ILL department as well as users of this important service.

In the fall of 2003 I also worked on an interesting project that involved collaborating with a diverse set of faculty and staff from Mount Holyoke College. I helped create a database search engine for a collection of metadata related to digital objects that had been scanned by the Mount Holyoke Archives. Professor Schwartz is working on a digital gazeteer of Mount Holyoke that will ultimately involve creating a digital map of MHC that will allow users to find digital items from the Archives relating to different aspects of the history of MHC. My work for this project involved migrating data from an Access database into MySQL and then building a CGI
interface in Perl to the data to allow students to perform searches for digital images from MHC's history. My main focus for this project was developing a search interface that was simple but powerful enough for the needs of students doing research.

In the spring of 2004 I began work on an electronic resources database that will allow MHC to collect together what is now disparate data regarding the status of our electronic resources. It integrates from our SFX instance title information that is associated with providers. This information can be easily linked to data we keep internally regarding our subscriptions, allowing for automatic updates on what titles from what resources we currently receive. This can be used to provide a good picture of what our coverage is in all areas of our electronic resources. The database also allows for the easy maintenance of vendor information, including financial data that can also be archived from year-to-year. This will give an excellent idea of how pricing has changed and where we are with spending for electronic resources. This has been an exciting and ambitious project that I have undertaken with the help of an intern from the Simmons College GSLIS program in Western MA. It has been an excellent learning experience for both of us and has provided an invaluable perspective on how to manage a software development project.

Other areas of my work have involved working on the ongoing maintenance of products such as Ex Libris' SFX and the training needed to implement their MetaLib version 3. These are both interesting and useful products that contribute to the overall access and use of important resources that the MHC Library offers to its community. For the fall of 2004 I look forward to making greater use of SFX and integrating information it contains into the Electronic Resources Database on an automatic basis and to implementing
MetaLib. I also look forward to the use of the Electronic Resources Database and the consolidation of our data concerning these resources in one place.

Brian Kysela on August 23, 2004