Trinity library’s 11 year old management system is to be updated over the following year in a project that will cost over €800,000. The new Library Management System will update the computers that manage student loans, stack requests, the catalogue, online journals and the system that orders and processes new books and journals that come into the library.
Trinity library’s 11 year old management system is to be updated over the following year in a project that will cost over €800,000. The new Library Management System will update the computers that manage student loans, stack requests, the catalogue, online journals and the system that orders and processes new books and journals that come into the library.
According to Librarian Robin Adams, the current system ‘ has become dated and lacks refinements now available.’ Following the introduction of the Stella Catalogue last year, the library wants to continue updating the system in a bid to move towards “Discovery tools” and social tagging. This would mean that a system of tag words similar to that used by Amazon would link many more materials than a traditional library catalogue would be able to. According to Mr Adams ‘the aim is to guide our readers to resource discovery that might not have occurred to them’.
In addition to this, the library will become more digitally aware as the new search engines will incorporate e-resources and other such electronic information into search results. In order to continually update its process, the new system will monitor library use over a period of time and respond to changing patterns.
The new project will cost over €800,000 partly funded by a grant from the HEA’s Research Equipment Renewal Grant Scheme 2007. However, this will not incorporate money for the cost to install and maintain the system. The project will be installed over the next 5 years and for the last two of these will incur running costs of 6% over budget. The library plans to pay for this through library income generated in 2013 and 2014.
Mr Adams outlined plans to launch a new library website in tandem to the new LMS system thereby creating ‘a whole new library world’. He continued to note that as the systems will be run parallel to the current system, there should be no danger that student library use will be disrupted.
The library plans to launch the new catalogue by August 2009 in time for the academic year. It hopes to complete the project by December 2009.
