My work and school worlds really seem to be converging, which is an interesting and wonderful phenomenon.
This past year I worked in a small school library – no budget, donated books, run by a wonderful and dedicated volunteer. This library was born from the energy of a retired English teacher who is passionate about our school. When they hired me, they were really looking for someone to help check books in and out, and shelve them. I, of course, as is my nature, couldn’t leave well enough alone, and simply do the job I had been assigned. :-;
For lack of anything better, our little library had all its records about books and circulation stored in an Excel worksheet – a home-grown system that worked fine as long as no one made any data entry or sorting errors. My background as a software developer made me itch to improve the situation, and, halfway through the year, I realized I could write software to go on top of the Excel spreadsheet, that would allow us to scan our books in and out, and generate classroom reports and student notices.
So, I built this software, and, we began to use it, and refine it. Of course, I knew that this was not a good final solution, but it was an acceptable band-aid. In general, it improved the reliability of the data we keep, and therefore our credibility with our patrons, parents, and staff.
Next year, we actually have a small budget(!), which hopefully will grow as the years pass. So, someday, a couple of years down the road, we may be able to purchase standard ILS software. This summer, I had hoped to find an interim solution, one that would move us closer to a “real” ILS. Also, this summer, we had decided that we should organize the non-fiction section by Dewey Decimal (we have a home-grown system there, too.)
During the course of LIS460, I began to explore LibraryThing – a classmate is making an encyclopedia entry for it, and it caught my eye. I’ve been communicating with the folks who provide LibraryThing, and it looks as if it might be a very nice interim (or even final?) solution for storing book data for our little library. I can, pretty easily, retrofit the circulation software that I wrote, so that it works with an Excel spreadsheet exported from LibraryThing. And– when you give LibraryThing an ISBN, it looks the book up in LOC and/or amazon.com and returns nearly a full MARC record – including Dewey Decimal number! Two birds with one stone!
I also started to investigate open source software for libraries, and the other day a library listserv that I monitor had a message about code4libs, a forum of developers who write software (open source, mostly) for libraries, in which they share their expertise. So, while I don’t know what ILS system we will ultimately choose, it certainly is fascinating to me how all these things are coming into my field of vision, from different directions, informing me, and giving us so many more options that I would have imagined a year ago.
3 comments:
This really is exciting.
One question I have, do you have any words of wisdom for a library teacher who might not have the kind of software background you have? Where might they start with this kind of project. Who might they want to befriend/talk to?
yes, I am in awe of you software background. I have an OPAC program and hate it. Terribly! I'm looking into open source, like Koha. Have you thought of something like that?
I looked at Koha a little bit, and I do think open source will be the way many libraries will go, eventually. At first glance, it looks as if Koha might be a bit of work to install and maintain, which would be a real obstacle for my small school. For several reasons, I don't think I will be there long-term, and I don't want to burden them with something that is tough to deal with. I see that some public libraries are trying open source, which is terrific. I wonder if they have software people on their staff?
There's Evergreen, too, http://www.open-ils.org/, and PALINET is addressing the concern Linda brought up. http://blog.palinet.org/dt/?p=22 It will be interesting to see what they recommend after evaluating these packages. (I just added that feed to Google Reader!)
In general, I have two concerns about open source software: a) agreement on features, and b) documentation. Open source is bound to be, feature-wise, good quality, because the dedicated people who volunteer their time to build it are most likely library practitioners. However, coming to agreement on what features to build could be quite difficult to manage. There will have to be some process set up to manage the discussion, and to make decisions. LibraryThing has active discussion/debate with its user community about features, which is very healthy, but, ultimately, the small team that makes the product makes the decisions. That’s harder to do when you have a large group of volunteers trying to band together to build something.
My second concern is about the quality of documentation one is likely to find with open source. It can vary significantly. I just spent half a day trying to figure out how/if a feature is implemented in some open source software I am describing for our tech encyclopedia. I ended up reading through the project blog, developer trouble tickets, and anything else I could find because it wasn’t clearly stated anywhere. Developers don’t usually like to write documentation :-(
Linda, if I had no software background, I would have no doubt just muddled through the year with what was there, and hoped to convince the powers-that-be down the road that a better solution was warranted. Certainly the local technology person would be a great person to consult, and, out of that discussion, perhaps open-source would have been considered. In general, I wouldn’t recommend building a home-grown system. I only went down that path to attempt to keep myself from twitching for the 2nd half of the year :-)
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