at the north of england institute of mining and mechanical engineers library, newcastle upon tyne
TRANSCRIPT
CREATING JAMIE
At the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers Library, Newcastle upon Tyne
IntroductionJennifer Kelly – Mining Institute Librarian (MCLIP)
Qualified librarian with strong understanding of the NEIMME collections.No previous experience of specifying LMS or database design!
James Watson – Mining Institute Systems Administrator (v)
Technical Architect of JAMIEMember of NEBytes (Newcastle based technology group) – close ties with local universitiesSystems Analyst specialising in systems deployments
North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers
Specialist reference library - 65,000 items on the catalogue.
Diverse collections: Books, journal runs, archives, objects, maps and photos.
Five libraries in one. 12,000+ volunteer
hours/year
Previous LMS problems
Old system malfunctioned on a regular basis
Data was not being saved “Ghost records” held on client machines Could not see our data outside the
software High maintenance fee for practically
zero support
Problems
Support’s solution was to upgrade (£15,000+).
Or £2,500+ to come out and look at our database and correct any errors due to a failure of validation rules by their software
Support told us our problems were caused by our configuration
Problems
Poor data – Author database, Subjects list.
Learning MARC Broadband speed Improving KOHA - database
performance Migration
Problems (images)
Database was held in multiple CSV files(A BIG NO NO) – We could only open in Excel and specialised custom written applications (Was not fully Excel compatible)
Passwords held in PLAIN TEXT!
Database files overlapping (cause of corruption, reason we use databases to store data NOT flat CSV files)
Problems
Database corruption
As we were instructed to run as an Administrator user on the server - we could remotely take control of our system by adding commands to an CSV file or by Web Connect (huge security risk)
Ghost recordsRecords would “disappear” or alter themselves due to the application closing faster than it can save the file the user is working on
Why Open Source?
Implement our own solution Less cost / More time trade-off Chance to look at our own problems and
fix them Stop these problems happening again Stop us being held in a contract with
practically non-existent support Stop us being locked in
How we did it
Started off looking at what we needed - tests
Worked closely with a local university, a company and lots of volunteers
Came up with an idea for minimum maintenance server on Windows
“Branched” off Koha and Evergreen for Windows
Got to work on implementation
Difficulty curve
Easy• Koha on Windows• Web Interface• Scalable Design
Hard• Evergreen modules on Windows• Programming scripts and modules to do what we need to do
(modifications)• Getting what we needed out of both packages
Extremely Difficult• KOHA performance improvements• Ensuring at least 99% of data is successfully transferred into MARC
code
How we did it
Specialised module linking Koha that converts NON-MARC code (txt, ini, CSV) into MARC-XML compliant code
Any that fail are outputted separately to a file for manual conversion
MARC (Librarian friendly) – XML (IT Friendly)
Logical separation of items
Frontend to website / library visitors to perform searches
For library staff and volunteers to create, edit, delete authorities, records and items
Conversion tools to convert non MARC compliant data into converted MARC-XML complaint records
Manages the server and the technical aspects of the software (updates, upgrades) with administrative capabilities over the database
How it works
Excellent Supports a larger record set and less
problems Continually improving Supports importing of non-compliant
records and converts them in a 3 layer staging pattern from older system (KOHA normally has 2 stage)Conversion, application and import
Costs
£900 hardware £150 p.a. server licensing £4,600 p.a. private support £20,000 Volunteer time
c.£6,000 p.a. per site
Performance
After performance enhancements, faster than standard KOHA
Includes features that are mandatory for specialised libraries (record vs series collection)
Worked on from a practical standpoint (not theoretical ideals, just practical usage)
CILIP UKCS v3 compliant (standards)
OPAC view
http://opac.mininginstitute.org.uk
LMS view
LMS record view
Contact us
www.mininginstitute.org.uk
Jennifer Kelly (Librarian):
@mininglibrarian0191 2332459
James Watson (IT):[email protected] 2332459