ILS Task Force Meeting Minutes for July 23, 2012
In attendance: Donna Morris, Anne Fischer, Karen Marriott, Lloyd Lovely, Kay Bauman
Polaris has sent us a formal proposal that seems very useful and pricing seems more in line with what we might need. Other vendors have sent ballpark figures and have promised a more detailed quote in the future.
Two (2) demos set so far:
- August 14 8:30-noon (DN) – Polaris
- August 15 8:30-noon (DN) – SIRSI
iii may show us a demo on August 16 8:30-noon while TLC will be toward the end of August.
Each of us discussed our observations of the catalogs and websites on our list to examine. So far we know that we want to learn about the amount of customization available. We were confused by the sorting by relevance and how that is determined. It seemed that no one had a true browse function, it actually was more like a keyword limited to specific fields. The committee members believe it is important to offer the keyword and a true browse functionality. To further explain this we searched for the title “Gone with the Wind” in several of the catalogs and were not always able to only find that specific title immediately as we do in our current ILS that offers a true alphabetical browse. In the current MLS Catalog, searching by title for “Gone with the Wind” yields the following:
When we searched by title in some of the other ILS vendors we found that it did not produce the exact match beginning with “gone with” rather it provided entries with the phrase “gone with the wind” that was included anywhere in the catalog entry.
Bibliocommons is used ‘in front of’ some of the ILS vendor software. Bibliocommons is a company that provides a layer between the library catalog and the customer with an interface that provides more discovery and searchability than a traditional catalog. This would translate into having 2 vendors to deal with and we are hesitant to want to do that. And, many if not all of the library vendors are adding more discovery and searchability type of interface to their catalog anyway so we should be able to have the functionality from the ILS vendor with their “flavor” of interface. What we’ve seen so far is that many of the libraries that are using Bibliocommons are not yet on the latest version of their ILS Vendor’s software.
Baltimore, which is run by Polaris, we all liked the ‘map it’ feature, which maps out which locations have the title in their collection.
TLC made a good first impression on several of us.
We need to look at our options with our 350,000 uncataloged paperbacks as most systems will not handle them the way we do.
Our next meeting will be July 31, 2012.
- Log in to post comments