Hi Jim,
Since your collection contains photos and artifacts in addition to
traditional books, you may want to look into open-source collections
management software. This software is often utilized by museums to
catalog a wide range of objects, and they support a variety of metadata
standards. This software might give you more precise cataloging for
your collections. My ESI colleague, Angela Kilsdonk, mentioned a couple
of products that you might want to explore:
CollectiveAccess <http://www.collectiveaccess.org/>
CollectionSpace <http://www.collectionspace.org/>
If you decide to use Evergreen or Koha, then you would be using MARC
records to describe your objects and books. As Galen and Jason
mentioned, you could simplify the MARC record so that your description
is very basic, which could make cataloging simple for your staff. You
may want to look at the demos for each and try to catalog a few items
from your collection. That might give you a sense of how they work and
if they would meet the needs of your collection and your staff.
Hope that helps!
Thanks,
Sally
On 3/28/2012 6:18 PM, Jim Hall wrote:
I'll try to answer each of you.
Steve Wills: I checked the site you linked. I can't picture the church
buying the Dell. They are determined that we use an old HP server that
they have replaced. If we can get the software setup alone, maybe.
Sally Fortin: It sounds like you're working on an interesting project!
Steve just made an interesting suggestion for working with digital
content, and I have a few general questions that might help as you
search for software to administer your church library:
1. What type of special collections do you have, e.g. photographs, objects, etc?
**** Photos, paintings, artifacts, printed material, audio tapes -
think of a museum.
2. Do you have digital content to make available?
**** Not yet, but we will.
3. What kind of access do you want to provide to these items? Do you
want to loan any of your collection(s) out to church members, the
community, etc.? Or do you simply want to make these items "findable?"
**** Access will from a computer in the church. Online someday, maybe.
Nothing will ever be loaned to anybody. Findable and viewable but not
touched. The items that will be viewable will have historical
descriptions, dates, people, etc., and one to several photos of the
materal. That's a healthy database.
4. Outside of special collections, what is your library collection
like? It sounds like you have traditional books in addition to your
special collections?
**** Special Bibles, faith related books, tapes and, discs; and a
fairly extensive number of ordinary books such as you would find in
any library.
George Dulmovich: Both systems are adept and flexible enough to manage
a wide variety of collections, small and large, including "special
collections."
I don't want to discourage you from looking at Koha or Evergreen, but
both systems would require your staff / volunteers to work in
MARC21-based environment, which IMHO may be a big barrier for a small
volunteer-driven library looking at adopting a Koha or EG solution.
**** This may not be a problem if a good frontend can be found
FWIW, my former boss is using this system in her church's library:
www.resourcemate.com. It's not MARC21 compliant, etc., but she
indicated good experience with it, especially given the number of
non-librarian (and non-techie) volunteers engaged in managing,
supporting their library.
**** I will tell them about resourcemate at the meeting this Saturday.
Jason Etheridge: Though I believe with Koha the record editor has
labelled fields, so you could stick with Title and Author for
simplistic cataloging (or with Evergreen, just remember 245 = title
and 100 = author). I know that would horrify a cataloger versed in
MARC, though, and you'd be losing subject headings, record types, etc.
**** I'll ask them what this will mean to them.
Galen Charlton: In addition, Koha's MARC framework system would allow
setting up a very minimal template for entering bibs so that
volunteers don't have to even see anything other than (say) title and
author. Evergreen's record template system can also be used for
setting up minimal templates, although they expose a bit more of the
MARC.
I do need to have you folks understand that the two committees want
the same software to handle both library and museum. I don't know if
that is at all possible, but I was tasked with asking, so I am.
Jim
--
Sally Fortin
Director of Education
Equinox Software Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
Tel: 770-709-5572
Email: [email protected]
Fax: 1-866-497-6390
