ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 59| October 2002
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National
Library Chooses Voyager
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LMS
Steering Committee (back, left to right) Warwick Cathro, Roxanne
Missingham,
Margy Burn and Stuart Flavell. (front, left to right) Julia Trainor, Pam Gatenby and Judith Pearce. Absent: David Toll, Peter Haddad |
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The National Library has announced Endeavor’s Voyager as its choice for a new Integrated Library Management System (ILMS). Implementation has begun and is expected to take six months. The first change users will enjoy is having a single online catalogue, whether they are at home or in the Library. The new catalogue will replace the three different catalogue interfaces that are currently required. Voyager will be more modern and easier to use than the current online catalogue. The Library will customise Voyager to integrate the online catalogue with the rest of the Library’s web site. Today’s web generation does not make a strong distinction between searching the Web and searching a catalogue. So a single search will target the Voyager catalogue and other indexes and finding aids that provide deeper access to the Library’s collections. It will also be possible to search the catalogue from many different places on the Library’s web site. The implementation of Voyager is a major project for the Library, because the Library uses the ILMS to manage access to all its collections, including manuscripts, maps, music, oral history, pictures, film and video, and digital resources. The Library has Australia’s largest library collection of maps and aerial photographs, and Voyager’s geospatial searching will enhance access to the cartographic collection. For 20 years the Library has been recording latitude and longitude data in its cataloguing records, waiting for the technology to exploit the data. Now the geospatial interface will enable the user to search for maps within an area defined by geographic coordinates, whether they are searching for a particular place, or a point within a radius, or places along a river, road or coastal corridor. The ILMS is the workhorse behind the search interface. With 150 staff currently involved in acquisitions, cataloguing and serial control, and large numbers of new collection items to be processed every day, the Library is looking forward to streamlining the efficiency of its backroom operations. In pursuing efficiency the Library will remain mindful that it is not ‘just another library’. The Library is the largest contributor to the National Bibliographic Database (NBD), and our original cataloguing of Australian publications underpins the efficiency of operations for Australian libraries and library suppliers. Any improvements to the Library’s own efficiency must not diminish the quality and timeliness of our contributions to the NBD. Preparation for the new system has commenced. We have identified test records for our data migration, and we have written test scripts that we will use for the acceptance testing of the new system. The new ILMS will have many options for customising the web interface to the catalogue. We have drawn up some policy guidelines for the customisation of the web interface. The guidelines address issues such as catalogue subsets, choices for search complexity (basic, advanced), display of search results, indexes, search limits, and options for requesting items found in a search. Cataloguing workflows are being examined to identify what changes must be made during the implementation, and what changes may be desirable further downstream. The next six months will be fast and furious,
and we look forward to announcing our new catalogue in mid-2003. |
| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |
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