Integrated Library Management Systems: overview

VINE Integrated Library Management Systems: overview John Akeroyd, Andrew Cox,

Article information: To cite this document: John Akeroyd, Andrew Cox, (1999) "Integrated Library Management Systems: overview", VINE, Vol. 29 Issue: 2, pp.3-10, https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040713 Permanent link to this document: https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040713 Downloaded on: 17 July 2017, At: 00:43 (PT) References: this document contains references to 0 other documents. To copy this document: [email protected] The fulltext of this document has been downloaded 372 times since 2006*

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Integrated Library Management Systems: overview


by John Akeroyd Head of Learning and Information Services, South Bank University & Director of LITC and Andrew Cox, Researcher, LITC, South Bank University

In this article we review the development of Integrated Library Management Systems, and look at some broad trends in their development. More and more core functions and special features have been integrated into library systems, and there has been a move towards industry standard databases, operating systems and architecture. The second part of the article looks at more aspirational library system designs, that reflect libraries' new needs in the light of the electronic publishing revolution and the open source software movement.

levels of innovation except perhaps in pure technology.

Circulation systems Circulation is perhaps the least problematic of the ILMS functions. That is not to say that it is not a complex matter but, perhaps as a consequence of increasing standardisation in issue policy across all libraries, coupled with a high level of parameterisation, circulation is perhaps the one function which now causes the library manager the least problems. In the early days of the ILMS, the most common concern was machine failure, leading to the withdrawal of all services, but the increasing reliability of machinery, which can almost guarantee 100% up-time, and with simplified processes for down-time and recovery, it has become much less a concern; down time now is more often planned than accidental. Circulation systems are also now able to cope with multiple libraries, multiple agencies and multiple policies so that they might straddle entirely different politically or economically based libraries. They typically use barcodes, which seem to have become a relatively standardised means of input, perhaps given the ease of creating and labelling books with them, although there are other input devices. Recent developments include :

Past and present Integrated Library Management Systems (ILMS) have their origins in the late 1970s; they grew out of systems which had been developed to cope with one or more discrete functions within libraries. For example Pica in The Netherlands and BLCMP in the UK originated in cataloguing systems. These were essentially co-operative systems, designed to ease the burden of cataloguing by sharing records and resources. ALS and the LIBERTAS system had their origins in simple library issue systems but which eventually expanded to include other functionality.1 These early systems were soon joined by purpose specific ILMS, sometimes aimed at specific types of library such as schools, colleges or research Universities. There has been a surprisingly consistent flow of new systems over the years despite the obvious limitations of the market, though new systems tend not to provide significant

•

Self service An important recent innovation has been self-issue and self-renewal. The difficulty with self-issue is not with software, but has more to do with the need for security and for desensitising securely tagged material. But it is a potentially massive time saver. At Hull 20% of issues are now self issue, as Diane Leeson points out in her article below.2

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E-mail overdues Another recent development has been the use of e-mail to send notices and overdues, which both simplifies the paperwork involved in notification and can provide significant savings in labour. Implementations are becoming more and more sophisticated, as Sudell and Robinson point out, the Aleph system can handle multiple user addresses posting overdues to students to term time and vacation addresses as appropriate. VINE 115 — 3


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Automatic telephone reservations, renewals, reminders Ameritech's Telecirc product for example, allows users to phone up and find out what they have on loan, and renew books interacting directly with the library system, without human intervention. Reservation and overdue notifications can also been done automatically.3 Radio Frequency ID technology This ultimately promises stock checking with the wave of a wand and the issuing of books without the user visiting the library counter. The cost of the labels (and inserting them into existing books) is the limiting factor. There have been developments since coverage in a previous issue of VINE with 3M following Checkpoint by fully committing to the technology.4

The online catalogue Most early online catalogues were relatively crude finding lists perhaps based on circulation records, with a minimum set of the MARC record and which would often present to the user a simple alphabetical filing list, coupled with keyword access or some degree of relational searching. These developed into the sophisticated OPACs which may now include a whole range of text retrieval techniques such as weighted searching (the attaching of weights to terms on the basis of frequency of occurrence in the data dictionaries), word stemming, truncation - right hand truncation is extremely common, left less so and perhaps less understood - and enriched subject access, which is not necessarily a matter of functionality but more matter of providing a richer subject base and subject terms within the bibliographic record, including Library of Congress headings, keywords, and even Tables of Contents. This latter development has contributed to what is known as the enriched OPAC. A further OPAC development has been the extended OPAC, which implies access to a variety of services other than the core bibliographic data. To some extent it was very much a feature of the 1980s prior to the development of the Web and might include services such as community information, opening hours, location venues and so on.

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Improved accessibility There are two new trends in OPAC development. First, most OPACs now have a Web version which usually has most of the functionality of their text based or windows version. Users may not all be using this version - because libraries have a big investment in dumb terminals only capable of handling text based searching or because they see an advantage in dedicated terminals. But the Web OPAC not only offers the user access to the catalogue from the browser, integrating it with other information sources, it also makes possible the inclusion of URLs in the bibliographic database (using the Marc field 856) creating live links to digital objects. Thus the user might search the OPAC, retrieve a URL and then trigger the web page, thus providing access to images, multimedia, audio etc. The use of HTML to design Web OPAC screens should also give the librarian great freedom in customising the OPAC, but there is a tendency to ignore research into OPAC and WebOPAC design and simply use whats given.

Z39.50 A second important development has been ISO standard Z39.50 which has sought to provide unified access to distributed resources but which has been slow to catch on and even now has a questionable future. The problems surrounding Z39.50 are multiple; there are still relatively few servers which support it and even those that do tend to carry bibliographic data which is very variable in nature. Moreover, different versions of Z39.50 have been implemented. These problems have limited its take up. One UK research project drafted the following as indicative of the problems posed by Z39.50 5 : •

"When cross-searching a number of hetero geneous services, the number of attributes supported by all targets tends to be very small e.g. the EU ONE 6 project found just one bibliographic attribute in common across project partners.

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Despite the existence of guidelines, institutions adopt varying practices when


mapping local data to the Bib-1 attribute set. •


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Serial holdings records are catalogued differently in different vendors' systems; this clearly has a major impact on requesting. The varying types and levels of detail amongst records returned from heterogeneous services in one result set could be confusing for users (e.g. bibliographic, archival and subject gateway records). Moreover, searching is often a slow process, particularly if there is a need for past search scrutiny."

Thus Z39.50 might have more of a future as a library tool for looking up specific texts, for example in interlibrary loans systems. There is significant continuing investment in Z projects in the UK, the US, Canada and Russia. A practical working example can be seen at the web site of the London based M25 consortium7 which illustrates that, despite the scepticism, Z39.50 may yet provide a solution the users need to search distributed catalogues.

Cataloguing & acquisitions Cataloguing has received much attention from the developers of ILMS and necessarily so. The complexities of Marc cataloguing, different classification schemes, and filing algorithms have all taxed even the most informed system developers. Entry systems would often require alternative outputs such as COM microfiche for back up and satellite libraries where network connections were too costly, whilst international collections have required software capable dealing with different character sets and multilingual data handling. One important early development was the link with cataloguing utilities such as BLCMP, LOCAS and SWALCAP in the UK and OCLC et al in the USA. As collaborative cataloguing services they rapidly released many libraries from the routine efforts in cataloguing and in some ways soon led to the automation of another key function, that of acquisitions. Cataloguing and acquisitions have now

become synonymous in system terms as records arrive at the order point and service a multiplicity of purposes through the order stage to the OPAC. The acquisition data is available to the user and to all staff with consequent service benefits.

The Management Information System The MIS attached to the ILMS has perhaps promised a lot but actually delivered very little. Many systems now provide a standardised interface to analytical tools such as Excel and often a standard set of reports or indicators such as issue figures, items catalogued, expenditure and so on. And there might even be an opportunity for greater degrees of standardisation to provide for interlibrary comparisons. The MIS arguably remains underdeveloped and under-utilised in most systems. It is rare, for example, for the acquisition process to be driven by the MIS, despite the often-quoted benefits of this.

Other functions Over the past few years the systems vendors have added other important library functions, many of which interlink with the core functions of cataloguing, circulation and OPAC. These include: •

Journals receipt, check-in and binding control: and also journal circulation, a common requirement of special libraries. In many respects these aspects of systems are only just maturing, and libraries are just beginning to reap the full benefits of automation in these areas.

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Inter library loan, which perhaps is not as common in the UK as in Europe as libraries in the UK have grown more used to working directly with one main provider, BLDSC. But ILL systems can usefully interface with the circulation and item database to provide direct reader access to the status of requests etc.

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Electronic reserves and item booking systems.

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Summary of developments within library systems

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Year 2000 compliance.

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In summary there are many worthwhile new types of service being built into the latest library systems, such as

Adding support for UNICODE - which permits bibliographic displays in any lan guage character set.

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Adopting wider standards e.g. ILL protocol, Z39.50 Standards. In theory when the standards have been developed and adopted it will be possible to have modules from different library systems working together. Complying to the NISO circulation protocol Geac's GeoWeb could in theory be used this way, according to Peter Evans. 8

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Self service

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Automated telephone services RFID


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Sirsi's Workflows: improving efficiency by building natural work patterns into the screens itself. This improves efficiency, reduces training needs. The library can also customise the workflow to its precise pattern of work. Many of the vendors are working with third party developers to offer enhanced OPAC for those with disabilities.

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The vendors have also developing experience of digitisation projects, community information projects and so forth.

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Housebound modules with full functionality.

Alongside these improvements in service, much of the vendors' effort in the last few years has been taken up with the migration of existing systems to keep pace with wider developments in computing standards such as windows, client server, the web (and of course year 2000 compliance).9 •

GUI interfaces for ease of use (e.g. cut and paste).

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Client / Server architecture, ideally multi-tiered, for reliability and speed of operation.

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Web enabled.

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Based on industry-standard relational databases management system.

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Providing an NT version as well as a Unix system.

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Both Ameritech and Innovative have products that can be used to authenticate users with remote databases, using information stored in the database of library users. Endeavor's Voyager 1 0 The system seeing most growth in sales at the moment seems to be Endeavor's Voyager, which has grabbed a big market share in the States in the last couple of years, and recently sold to the National library of Scotland (replacing VTLS), the University of Edinburgh (replacing Advance and Libss100+) and to a consortium of Cardiff University, University of Wales Aberystwyth, University of Wales Lampeter, University of Wales Swansea and the Welsh College of Music and Drama (replacing Libertas). Endeavor have stepped ahead of the competition partly taking advantage of being a latecomer in the market: Voyager is a native windows system, based on an industry standard RDMS (Oracle), multi-tiered architecture.

The Future: new functions, new software development models While there is a crying need for cheap systems for small libraries that require a minimum of technical expertise to set up and run, most attention will inevitably focus on more fundamental development work required by libraries adjusting to the electronic publishing revolution. Some of the functionality promised by projects working in


these areas are the best indicator of future development. We are not suggesting that ultimately all this functionality will be supplied by a single system it is highly likely that the new functions will be implemented by smoothly interoperating, but technically separate, systems.

relevant sources, from a single search query. The results can be refined, aggregated, selected. 3.

Locate: The locations of different occurrences of a resource are found.

4.

Deliver: The user gets access on the screen, or pointed to local print holdings, or document delivery options. This may involve handling copyright signatures.

Some things libraries might want are •

to integrate multiple sources and systems both of bibliographic information and full text, what has become known as the hybrid library e.g. Agora's Hybrid Library Management System;11

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to simplify but also control access to resources, gather better information on usage as in the CANDLE project's Cactus system;12


Cactus system

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to collect, archive and manage access to diverse digital objects e.g. the National Library of Australia tender for a digital collection management system;13

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to personalise resources, linking people with similar interests and improve information retrieval e.g. Autonomy's Portal-in-a-boxl4 or visualisation software like FilmFinder;15

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and perhaps to change the whole way software is created and maintained, to embrace open source software. This is illustrated by the Avanti project.16

Another prototype 'digital library management system' is the Cactus system. Cactus was first conceived as a tool for managing PCs in public workstation rooms: it gives managers the ability to control, monitor use and customise software applications, and other resources (printers and filestore). Different user groups can be given different sets of resources. A Z39.50 client can be customised with different Z targets for different user groups. Monitoring the usage of applications through the system can provide information on which to rationalise licence purchases. There are several interesting features here: •

Currently under development is the addition of networked information resources as controllable objects within the system, and addition of a function to authenticate the user transparently with such resources. The system effectively intercepts requests for resources requiring passwords and supplies them if the user is authorised. Off site access to IP address authenticated resources is also accomplished.

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The user gets a customised set of resources which they can immediately access without passwords etc. This simplifes life for the end user currently confused by the vast array of possible resources, each with their own authentication method.

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Access to resources can also be securely limited opening up the possibility of negotiating licences for small user groups, as opposed to the catch all licences currently preferred.

Agora Hybrid Library Management System The Agora HILMS is premised on the assumption that the library will need to manage a wide range of resources print and electronic, dispersed over different Internet locations. The need is to integrate all resources for the user. 1.

2.

Discovery: the user is guided to the appropriate resources. This is based on user profiling on the one hand and collection level descriptions on the other. Search: The user's search is sent to a range of

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•

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Another feature of the system is the collection of detailed usage statistics that can be used to refine subscription choices.

Increasing access to all knowledge in the organisation. •

By applying (they say) 'advanced techniques of concept analysis' they can achieve very accurate matching of sources and users interests, thus avoiding information overload.

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Personalised features based on understanding of users interests based on their behaviour and reading, not a once and for all registration of interests against predefined categories - or simple keywords selection.

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Links to people with similar interests, based on this knowledge of interests and reading.

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All indexing is automated.

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ActiveKnowledge tool follows your work, in say, a word document and at a user determined level, and makes suggestions of relevant documents in a window.

The Cactus system could potentially be used to scaleably manage access to all sorts of http based resources: publisher's electronic journals and databases and Intranet.

Interestingly, in a sense the Cactus work recognises that customised software packages and information resources need to be managed in similar ways.


National Library of Australia Digital Collection Management System The National Library of Australia has recently put out to tender for a system to collect, preserve and enable access to digital objects. Some of the requirements are: •

to collect digital objects regardless of file type;

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to preserve directory structure and file names;

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to extract descriptive metadata;

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collect and maintain a depository of software supporting access (plugins, browsers etc);

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check whether an item has been updated;

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track missing issues etc of digital serial style publications;

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give users various preview options (thumbnails, samples of audio, first pages of documents);

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maintain information about who holds IPR;

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enforce access control where access conditions apply.

Autonomy's Portal in a Box •

Can deal with a wide range of sources of data, both structured databases and full text.

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This sounds like a marvellous system, though the non-technological barriers, such as a reluctance to reveal information, or to spam the system are likely to be colossal, even if the technology works perfectly. It perhaps doesn't take sufficient account of the need to integrate printed and electronic sources. FilmFinder Ben Shneiderman's Human Computer Interface Laboratories are working on improving user interfaces. One of their major ideas is that visualising collections of material is far quicker than text based access. We can take in much more information, more quickly through maps or diagrams of information collections. Their mantra for the design of such visualisation environments is 'overview first, zoom and filter, detail on demand'. FilmFinder is one developed product. The users get a pictorial view of all the objects in the database, in something like a scatter diagram. They can change what values are used for the axes. They can zoom in, effectively filtering out parts of the collection. Through other filtering tools they can make searches, creating the equivalent of complex boolean concepts, through graphical manipulation,


seeing instantly on screen the effects of their explorations. With all the talk of information landscapes within eLib it is slightly surprising there has not been more research on maps of collections of documents or the contents of documents, visualisation of documents as landscapes or solar systems. User interfaces to OPACs could be very different if Ben Shneiderman's ideas are adopted.


Avanti Avanti is a library system being developed as an Open Source system, in an initiative led by Peter Schlumpf, Systems Specialist at the North Suburban Library System in Wheeling, Illinois (http:// nslsl.nslsilus.org/~schlumpf/avanti/). Avanti is to be written in Java, and will therefore be platform independent (run under any operating system). It is intended to be independent of any particular implementation too, e.g. it makes no assumptions about the content or format of bibliographic records. It is not based on any proprietary database and it will probably be free of charge. But what is really novel about it is that it is open source. The code that underlies the software is made available to users, and they can customise it as they wish. OSS has been defined by Daniel Chudnov as software ' typically created and maintained by developers crossing institutional and national boundaries, collaborating by using internet-based communications and development tools'. ( Open Source Library Systems: Getting Started, http:// info.med.yale.edu/library/oss41ib/articles/ oss41ibarticle.html). Enthusiasts say the software is just better when developed by open source methods, because there are lots of people working on it with access to the code to improve it. Their motives are to improve the software not to make money. Also the software is better to use because it is possible for the user to understand how the system they are using works. It is likely to be based on open standards leading to greater interoperability.

time or skills to do the development work. It is in fact cheaper to buy an expensive out of the box solution. There is a danger that such products are just developed for the techies - not the real users. Having said this, successful open source developments include LINUX, PERL, apache (most popular web server since 1996, according to Netcraft, http://www.netcraft.co.uk/survey/), Netscape's Mozilla and Sendmail.

Conclusion The systems we have briefly described here have many features that may appear in the next generation of library system: the ability to personalise content, to draw in information from disperate sources and integrate it, to link people as well as information, to archive information and apply version control and copyright management and, of course, to have the system designed for free.

References 1.

This history can be traced in the early issues of VINE.

2.

See also the issue Self service in libraries, VINE 105

3.

Telecirc, http://www.amlibs.com/product/ telecirc.htm

4.

See VINE 112, p. 43-49

5.

Pinfield, S. et al Realizing the hybrid library. Dlib Magazine October 1998 http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib

6.

ONE project. http://www.dbc.dk/ONE/ oneweb/index.html

7.

M25 Link project, http://www.M251ib.ac.uk/ M25link/

8.

Towards software components in the library automation industry, Bibliotech review, http://www.gadgetserver.com/bibliotech/ html/software_supermarket.html

9.

See Dania Bilal, Jeff Barry, & W. David Penniman A balancing act. Library

Software houses continue to make their money basically by offering support services. Of course there are limitations on how far open source could be taken, particularly in the library setting. Most library systems staff do not have the

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Journal, April 1 1999. Also available at http://www.amlibs.com/ls/press/1999/

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil and Olive the On-line Library of Information Visualization Environments http://www.otal.umd.edu/ Olive/


library_journal.htm 10.

Endeavor, http://www.endinfosys.com/

11. 12.

Agora, http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/agora/ Candle, http://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc/ The system was more fully described in VINE 112.

13.

National Library of Australia, http://www.nla.gov.au/dsp/rft/

14.

Autonomy, http://www.autonomy.com/

15.

Film finder uses software now developed commercially as Spotfire pro, http:// www.spotfire.com See also The Human Computer Interaction Lab

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16.

For more on OSS in libraries see oss41ib http://info.med.yale.edu/library/oss41ib/ and http://www.opensource.ac.uk/

Contact Details John Akeroyd Head of Learning and Information Services South Bank University and Director of LITC Email:[email protected] Andrew Cox Researcher LITC South Bank University Email:[email protected]

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