I thought it might be time to share another update about our project to recatalog our Temple's library collection. I've posted a couple of other notes since last December about questions and issues we've encountered during this project (links below, if you are interested in some of the background). We've passed a few important milestones recently and wanted to share our progress, in the hope it is helpful to others.
As mentioned in earlier posts, I'm a retired academic librarian (MLIS Drexel '79), with some experience in Jewish librarianship. I took on responsibility managing my temple's neglected collection as a volunteer a couple of years ago. We decided to recatalog the entire collection from scratch and we decided to use Weine classification and chose LIBIB ( http://libib.com) as the platform supporting our online catalog and circulation system. I won't go into details about the whys-and-wherefores of these choices, since this was covered in earlier posts, but I did want to say something about out experience so far. We've managed to add more than 2700 volumes to the catalog system, with fewer than 100 of these still needing full cataloging. We've depended on a couple of other, larger Weine libraries' catalogs for classification help. As I'm sure you are aware, cataloging work is ongoing and we're still finding our footing on some important decisions about how we want to organize our collection. While our experience with Weine hasn't been all we hoped, I don't regret the decision. We've found fairly good resources to support this work and AJL is in the process of reviving a support group. I think the key hurdle with Weine is also tied to its key strength, its basis in Dewey classification. Weine overcomes some, but not all of Dewey's problems. However, what it misses in terms of coverage and organization, it makes up for it simplicity and familiarity. The experience with LIBIB was been exceptionally positive. While our initial decision was based on a "good enough" assessment, the product and their support team continually exceed our expectations. While LIBIB isn't a true, full-featured catalog, it more than meets the needs of a small library collection such as ours. For instance, it doesn't provide field searching or boolean operators and its sorting algorithms are mysterious. But for a collection of 3,000 volumes, this isn't a significant deficit: in fact, it works very well for our situation. You can see our cataloging work in progress at http://tbeaptos.libib.com More important has been the responsiveness of their support crew. Whenever we've sent in a problem ticket, they typically responded within an hour. And they've solicited comments and questions about features from us and have been very responsive in trying to find solutions that will work for us. For instance, we wanted a way to force Yiddish pseudonyms, such as Sholom Aleichem and Der Nister, to sort according to standard practice (under S and D, rather than A and N) and they fixed that for us. We asked if they could provide a way to link out from catalog records, for ebook sources, for instance: They added that function in a matter of days. Most recently, we are preparing to implement circulation and thinking about talking with them about availability of a kiosk-mode to allow self-checkout: this week they announced a new kiosk mode unasked. If your library is in the market for a catalog system and particularly if you cannot afford or don't have the resources to support one of the bigger systems, I strongly suggest you consider LIBIB. I'm glad to share more about our experience if anyone wants to contact me. Finally, one of the most frustrating hurdles we encountered was process of getting from online catalog records to spine labels. This process was complicated by the need to include barcodes with the shelf labels. LIBIB allows us to export our records, including a record ID in the form of an EAN-13 barcode, in a CSV formatted file. The barcode is integral to the self-checkout function. We investigated various options to allow us to turn that list into working spine labels. A message to this list asking for help received only one response, but no help with the bulk loading problem. We eventually discovered that Avery has a free labeling application that can import data from a CSV file and will produce barcodes. It's not easy to use but it does what we need - most of the time - and works better than anything else we've been able to find. We've just managed to print a sample of about 400 labels as our first test of this feature. We hope to wrap up the last of the cataloging and have the collection relabelled and shifted by the High Holidays (b'li neder) and reinstitute circulation shortly after. If you are interested in our work, I'm happy to hear from you. The links below are to earlier notes to HaSafran describing out project. Good Shabbos, Lee Jaffe, librarian Temple Beth El, Aptos http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.osu.edu/msg06283.html http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.osu.edu/msg06325.html http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.osu.edu/msg06372.html http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.osu.edu/msg06512.html
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