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Library Management System Evaluation Committee

Access Services

Susan Currie, Howard Raskin

Debra Lamb-Deans, Carmen Blankinship

Members, CUL Access Services Program Committee (including ILS staff in Mann, Law, Olin/Kroch/Uris, Vet, Geneva)

1.1 Circulation/Reserve: Basic requirements

The Circulation/Reserve System is intended to control circulation of materials loaned by and among CU Libraries. The system will also maintain patron files, loan files, and other files appropriate to relationships between a library and its patrons. The system will produce appropriate statements and notices for patrons. The capabilities of the Circulation/Reserve System will be used to notify patrons of available materials returned from circulation or newly received. The system must have capabilities for variable loan periods that accommodate the libraries' schedules; for hold, recall, and notices for patrons for transaction fines; and blocks of delinquent patrons for patron accounts; for identifying and processing materials for course reserve; and for appropriate batch-produced notices. The system should produce a variety of reports which can be customized -- both system-wide and by library -- on uses of libraries and collections and categories of users. The system should accommodate e-mail transmission of patron notices.

The system must have a fiscal control component capable of tracking fines and fees owed the library, with the ability to restrict fine payment to an item's home library. The system must allow circulation staff to view fines and fees incurred at all libraries. The system must provide loan histories for items which have overdue or replacement fees, including a history of notices sent; must have the ability to automatically generate replacement bills and for setting various fine rates based on material and location. Designated staff will be able to enter parameters that specify desired loan periods for various library locations and types of materials, as well as parameters that define the period of, and the processing steps involved in overdue processing activities. Circulation staff will be able to forward and backdate to accommodate special loan periods.

Designated staff will be able to override specified system blocks.

Designated staff will be able to enter into the system the effective date and time of discharge should those be different from the current date and time. This will permit discharge of items that were returned when the library was closed or the system was unavailable without incurring unwanted overdue and fines processing; the system should alert staff to multi-part items for verification before final discharging.

Upon the identification of materials with holds or recalls, the system will notify staff of status; status will be dynamically updated in the OPAC. The system will produce hold notices and notify requesters of the availability of unwanted items. The system will automatically produce "available-items-on-hold" notices for requesters and set up loan records and processing cycles to control unclaimed items placed on hold shelves.

The system must track materials being searched, declared lost or missing; search lists sorted by call number within a specified time period are necessary.

The system must be compatible with barcodes currently being used (Data Composition, Code 39). The system should have the capability to assign a single barcode to multiple items (across bibliographic records) and should require verification for this process.

The system must accommodate different classes of patron privileges for each library.

The system must have a complete and flexible interface with other university systems such as the Bursar, Collections Agency, University Registrar and Human Resources.

Course reserve processing and records should be completely integrated with circulation functions. The system should support the processing of reserve material by generating pick lists of material previously on reserve, as well as track material as it is being processed (i.e., "on order," "requested from professor," "requested from library X," "not on reserve this semester"). Charges and discharges of reserve material will be made for loan periods as short as one half hour, with appropriately specified processing steps and fine schedules. Patrons should be able to place holds on reserve materials. Online catalog displays should be available for reserve items by all the searches and displays available for other bibliographic records. The system should provide additional searching and display by course name and number and by professor's name. The system should be able to import and export bibliographic records in standard MARC format to aid reserve book processing. Reserve system software should fully support the extended ASCII character set. All updates to reserve course, professor and bibliographic information should be dynamically updated in staff mode and public displays.

The system must support the integration of electronic reserve systems. It should interface with university systems for course descriptions and faculty listings; should accommodate various file formats, including TIFF, PDF and HTML. The system should support Web Access and Web transmission of digitized documents; should provide circulation status of non-digitized items (i.e. books, videos or other non- digitized materials). The system should provide a copyright management system; full integration with the bibliographic file to assist with database building for books; must be compatible with ATM and other high speed networks; ability to interface with relational and object oriented databases; should support a variety of scanners and scanning software.

The system should interface with selfcharge systems for patron self-service check-out and renewal.

1.2 Interlibrary Loan: Basic Requirements

The Interlibrary Loan Management component is intended to support the interlibrary loan activities of CU libraries by providing an online management system for all CUL borrowing and lending transactions. It should be able to accommodate the transmission, updating, storage, and display of interlibrary loan requests and messages to and from non-CU libraries.

The capabilities required for interlibrary loan include the online transmission of, and management of, interlibrary loan requests and other kinds of messages already provided through interlibrary loan systems utilized and accessed at Cornell including RLIN, OCLC, and other document suppliers. The system should accommodate use of document transmission software (e.g. Ariel) and telefacsimilie software.

The Interlibrary Loan Management functions should be integrated with the Circulation/Reserve System and should support Z39.50 as well as ISO standard protocol. Processing functions will use ILL protocol (ISO 10160 and ISO 10161), a communications standard which permits the exchange of ILL messages between different ILL systems and hardware. The ILL protocol provides support for the control and management for both lending and borrowing activities. The ISO ILL Protocol should have been tested for interoperability by the vendor to ensure that two or more implementations can communicate with each other in an operational environment. Additionally, the system should fit the profile established by the ILL Protocol Implementors Group and should include all requestor states, responder states, messages and all three types of ILL transactions (simple, chained and partitioned).

The system should support a variety of scanners and scanning software for digital document transmission for interlibrary loan.

This component will provide a variety of statistical, operations, and management reports and should have an integrated invoicing program.

1.3 Patron Control Function: Basic Requirements

The Patron Control Function will create, store, and maintain patron records that contain personal information about patrons and their relationships with libraries. The system will accommodate input, update, and maintenance of patron data from a variety of sources (e.g., host institutional personnel files, files of currently registered students). The system will accommodate both the voiding of patron privileges granted for academic terms, and validation of privileges for new registrations. It will allow for automatic purging of unwanted patron records, according to library -specified parameters.

Patron records should include, but not be limited to, the following fields:

Confidential patron information will be displayed only to authorized personnel.

Staff will be able to display all or selected portions of the file as needed.

The system will provide for patron accounting and will be able to produce on-line displays and printed reports that show patrons' outstanding loans, fines, and other recorded relationships with libraries. The system should provide for dynamic updating of patron records.

The system will provide the capacity to produce delinquent patron fine records for purposes of collection.

The system will allow libraries to record charges for services and rental of materials. An interface with the Fiscal Control System will permit accounting and billing information to be generated accordingly. The system will interface with other university Accounting systems (e.g. Registrar, Human Resources, Collections.)

1.4 In-house Inventory Control: Basic Requirements

The system should allow staff to perform shelf-reading using portable scanning devices to read the machine-readable labels on library materials.

Staff will upload data from the portable devices. The system will compare to the Bibliographic Data Base System the items so identified in addition to the items whose locations are recorded by Circulation/Reserve System files, and produce reports of items not on the shelves whose absences are not recorded. The system will also report those items on the shelves that are not in their proper places by call number order. The system will also produce reports of materials that have circulated and have been browsed as well as materials which have not circulated within a specified amount of time.

The system will also allow staff to tally in-house use of uncharged materials by reading the machine-readable labels of items being reshelved.

1.5 Off-site Facility Inventory Control: Basic Requirements

The library management system must be compatible with a "stand alone" inventory system. Bibliographic information will be shared between the systems; barcodes must be compatible.

All user interaction will be through the library management system; users will be able to request direct requests through the catalog. The system must interface with patron database and circulation system; must generate pick lists from patron requests, provide collection use, management information and other statistics.

1.6 Bindery: Basic Requirements

The system should support binding operations for serials which have a variety of receipt schedules, patterns, indices, tables of contents, etc. The system should be able to recognize when it is time to bind a copy of a particular title based on information input into the order/pay/receipt records. Additionally, there should be sufficient space to record information on the type of binding, color, spine title, special instructions, etc.

The system should generate pull slips for retrieving issues that are ready to be bound. Generated pull-slips should have the capability to be printed in any desired order (e.g. by title, call number, etc.). When generating pull slips and other forms, the system should be able to generate routine and specialized reports and statistics on volumes bound, items at bindery, overdue, etc. The system should also have flags to alert staff when binding periods have been overlooked as well as have the capability to be overridden if binding schedule is to be changed. Local units would have the ability to customize changes to the binding schedules.

The system should accommodate printing binding slips according to a library's specifications including which items were sent to the bindery and when they were sent. This information should display in the online catalog. The system should accommodate holds for patrons who want to view volumes upon return.

The system should record which issues have come back from bindery and automatically update holdings statements according to established standards.

1.7 Booking/Scheduling: Basic Requirements

The Booking/Scheduling functions are intended to support booking and loan of audiovisual and computer hardware and software by CUL and booking of meeting rooms and other physical plant facilities.

The Booking/Scheduling functions should have capabilities to determine possible booking dates for requested audiovisual and computer hardware and software, to identify materials by subject and type (e.g., 16 mm or 8 mm), to record advance bookings, to cancel or change bookings, to produce picking lists for gathering preparation of pieces to be loaned, to note when equipment of films are damaged and are not available for use pending repair, and to schedule equipment and software for preventive maintenance/replacement. The system must take into account the use of available delivery systems; requests for multiple, possible booking dates; multiple bookings per day. The system should record and report the use of materials in a variety of ways.

As with the circulation/reserve/interlibrary loan components, the system must accommodate various institutional policies on where and by whom items may/may not be used, interlibrary loan of audiovisual items, etc.


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3/31/97 sac & hbr

rev. 7/24/97 dih