Library Gazette

On Wednesday the Z. Smith Reynolds Library implemented a new discovery system for their library collections. The system, developed initially by Villanova University, employs innovative indexing and searching techniques to help patrons find and interact with library resources.

This new tool adds the ability for patrons to discover new relationships between resources through the use of faceted browsing, a technique which is commonly used on web-based stores such as Amazon. It also introduces new community-focused features such as the ability to add comments and tags to catalog records. These features allow library patrons to easily discover resources by combining several limiting criteria (such as format, location, and publication date) using dynamic links on the results page.

The system complements a suite of locally-developed and open source information systems that the library employs including the New Book/Film Walls, WakeSpace (a digital library of WFU collections), Book delivery and reserves services, and library-sponsored blogs and wikis for the university community.

As many of you know, the ZSR library is beginning to look at open source alternatives to our current systems.  A few of us have seen Vufind in action and have talked about Open ILS alternatives.  This discussion is just starting and should yield some interesting results in the coming months.

One thing that I have heard from many people at our library is the need to have an easy to use online reporting tools for our information systems.  Every year we run EOY reports, general statistics, fund accounting reports in addition to lots of disposable queries.  Right now we are limited to using MS Access to design our queries and pull this information.  There are more sophisticated tools out there though.  Some of you may remember a brief period when we were using Cognos in conjunction with our departed ERMS.

In the last few years, a few companies that serve this purpose but in an open source environment have come along.  I was curious about what this market currently looked like and wondered what sort of functionality we would be looking for specifically so I created a short page in our Wiki to start gathering ideas.

If you are curious about what BI software does or want to add your thoughts - hit the wiki page.

By the way - more to come soon on evaluating Open Source Catalogs….