An Integrated Library System will allow the library:
• to provide faculty and students with a larger universe of scholarly
information
• to provide faculty and students with more control over that information
• to deliver information in more sophisticated ways
• to simplify your life and save you time
• to work more easily with publishers, universities, and database suppliers
throughout the world who operate with current technology (unlike the 1970’s
technology that is the underlying basis of the library’s current systems)
• to achieve operating efficiencies that will allow the library to expand the
utility of the traditional print library, while offering the new benefits of a
modern digital library
Examples:
A modern integrated library system will help you with these new digital library activities:
• show access to thousands of additional electronic journals that we currently can’t add to the
catalog due to workload and technical reasons
• allow the library to fully integrate modern Web linking technology (OpenURL) which will
vastly increase the resources available to you, put new library services at your fingertips, and
help to eliminate dead-ends and fruitless searches.
• allow the library to utilize modern federated search technology giving you the power to
simultaneously search many different Web databases in your subject area through one
“google-like” search box.
• allow the library to seamlessly include the rapidly growing full-text contents of Webaccessible scholarly institutional repositories, open access journals and books, pre-print
servers, and open archives initiative compliant databases, to your searches and results (at
your discretion).
• improve the library’s ability to seamlessly integrate library resources with third party
information tools such as Blackboard, PubMed, Google, etc. thereby creating a user friendly
electronic scholarly information environment.
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A modern integrated library system will help you with these traditional library activities:
• show you when the latest issues of a periodical have arrived
• allow you to save your citations in a ‘shopping cart” and export or e-mail them to yourself
• allow you to set up profiles so that you will automatically be notified when new books in
your subject areas arrive
• work with bibliography software such as Endnote, ProCite, and Noodlebib
• integrate automatically with interlibrary loan functions, making it easier to order the books
and journal articles you need
• allow more accurate searching (for example the current 1970’s era catalog limits the size of
the fields that can be searched – meaning that not all the words in a record are searchable.
The current catalog does not allow for broad date limit searches, and it has problems with
foreign language searching since it is not a Unicode compliant system.)
• allow for more accurate and timely additions to the catalog (since records can be
automatically validated for accuracy (error detection) as they are created, and automatically
added to the catalog without waiting)
• allow the library to more accurately predict and purchase the material that you will need in
the future, since modern library systems have more sophisticated statistical reporting and
tracking modules.
A modern integrated library system will help library staff:
• to stop relying on 1970’s era technology, to upgrade to the same library tools that are used
by the rest of North American libraries, and to achieve operating efficiencies.
• to re-purpose staff from inefficient and redundant operations into new areas where they can
work to provide you with more information, more quickly, and in more convenient and
sophisticated ways – thereby saving you time.
• to integrate with publishers and information agencies around the world who are using
modern technology to communicate with their library customers, thus allowing the library to
meet your needs more quickly.
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If the library does not purchase a new Integrated Library System
faculty and students:
• will not have access to the information tools available to the rest of higher
education
Our faculty and students will be less empowered and less in control of their
information environment than their peers. They will not have access to alert
functions, to profiles, to shopping carts, to federated searching, to OpenURL
implementations, to an integrated scholarly information environment, to modern
searching technology, to automated interlibrary loan, or seamless access to new
emerging scholarly information formats. They will not be able to make full and
effective use of productivity tools such as Endnote or Procite, and the library will not
be in position to take advantage of continuing improvements to Blackboard and
similar learning environments.
• will have access to a smaller universe of information
Our faculty and students will not have built-in access to OAI compliant scholarly
databases, institutional repositories, or open access journals or books. They will not
have access to the full depth of our subscribed and purchased scholarly material
because we cannot create records for all of it in our catalog due to the inherent
inefficiencies and additional workload imposed by our outdated library technology.
• will spend more time doing research
Our faculty and students will not be able to take advantage of the scholarly research
conveniences built into modern library systems, but instead will have to continue to
work with old technology and will have to learn convoluted and time-consuming
work-arounds in order to perform competitive research.
• will use search technology that misses research material and is less effective
than at peer institutions
Users will continue to have to cope with the 1970’s limits on field length, searching
technology, and multi-lingual support, making every one of their catalog searches
less efficient. They will also not have access to the complete universe of information
they are entitled to – because we cannot create records and access paths for all of the
library’s scholarly material due to the state of our technology.
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• will have access to fewer e-journals
The library will not have the technology to catalog, maintain, and link from the
catalog to the universe of e-journals we have access to through via OpenURL
technology.
• will spend more time tracking down printed journals
The library will not be able to tell users which current periodical issues are
available.
• will not be competitive with their peers at other institutions who have access
to modern information systems
Our faculty and students will have poorer access to less information, and it will take
them longer to do their research than if the library had modern technology. In short,
our students and faculty will be at a disadvantage when compared to peer institutions
which have sophisticated modern information technology.
• will find an increasing amount of frustrating errors in the existing library
system
Because current library technology is not integrated, but consists of many different
subsystems that do not communicate with one another and which are maintained by
different people - it results in public displays that contain mismatches,
discontinuities, and pure errors which the library corrects on a daily basis. But the
overhead of working with old technology in a modern day and age, are overwhelming
the library’s ability to keep up with and correct these problems. Modern technology
would not only correct these structural issues, but it would also include automatic
record validation and error checking which would improve the quality of all the
library’s research tools.
• will see a reduction in library services as the library re-purposes staff to
devote more time to propping up the old technology, and to jerry-rigging
work-arounds to the new information services around the world that cannot
work with our old technology
The library will have to devote more staff time to maintaining an inefficient and outdated technology, which will require the library to move staff from away from public
service positions in order to help with behind-the-scenes maintenance activities.
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