11th Annual Innovative Users Group Conference
Christina Hennessey
Overview
The 11th Annual Innovative Users Group (IUG) Conference was held in San Jose,California at the Fairmont Hotel on April 25-28, 2003. The conference welcomed over 1,100 people from 14 countries. Most of the attendees were librarians from libraries that use Innovative's integrated library system of products (both the Millennium release and the character-based Innopac), although there were 60 employees from Innovative Interfaces, Inc. in attendance as well. The conference consisted of over 100 presentations either given by librarians from Innovative sites or by Innovative employees, and often librarians and Innovative employees gave presentations together. A full program of events is available at: www.innovativeusers.org/iug2003/index.html.
The IUG was founded in 1991 and realized a need to start having annual,international conferences a few years later. They are a completely independent organization outside of Innovative Interfaces, Inc., although they do have a close working relationship with the company. IUG is headed by a steering committee of librarian volunteers, and the membership consists of "member libraries" instead of individuals (if you are an employee of a member library, you are a member of IUG). IUG runs a Web site, a listserv for discussion about Innovative products, and co-ordinates the discussion and voting on recommended enhancements for future releases of Innovative products. You can read more about the IUG at: www.innovativeusers.org/
About the sessions
Although not advertised as such, the ideal attendee of this conference would seem to be a librarian who had worked with Innovative products or other integrated library systems for a few years, found some limitations, and wanted to know ways to work around those limitations. Many of the presentations were practical in the "I had this problem and here's how I solved it" sense. Popular topics with several solutions were exporting and manipulating data created within the system, and how to handle electronic journals in your catalog. As Innovative runs on a UNIX server, many of the solutions presented at the conference involved writing PERL scripts to automate tasks that require several commands and/or lots of staff time. Presentations by Innovative product managers covered new Innovative modules and features coming in later releases of Innovative products.
Several sessions were run by the IUG and devoted to the discussion of future enhancements of the Innovative products. These discussions will be a starting point for the next round of enhancement lists. Innovative provided a helpdesk throughout the conference staffed by several employees, where you could bring your technical questions in person instead of submitting over the phone or through e-mail.
The presentations ran the gamut from extremely technical to very simple, but most of the talks were quite practical. All presentations assumed an intermediate knowledge of the Innovative products and infrastructure. I will report on only a few of the sessions I attended.
Chris Batt's keynote
The keynote speech of the conference was given at the opening session by Chris Batt, who is the Deputy Chief Executive and Director of the Libraries and Information Society Team for Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries in the UK, which is part of the People's Network Project. This council is part of the UK government's commitment to "give everyone in the UK the opportunity to use computers and access the Internet". From his presentation, it seems that this initiative is really working in the UK, and is not just a dream as these ideas often are. One of the themes of his presentation was "this is not a library, this is a revolution". Batt encouraged us to think outside of the traditional library and university models. Consider that someday there may be a "Wal-Mart University" where people can pick and choose courses from all over the world, which they would "attend"online, culminating in one degree. In the UK, some of the new libraries are referred to as "idea stores" (although he noted that people still refer to it as "the library").
In order to meet the new technical demands of the patrons, part of the initiative is to train library workers on the latest technology. The goal is to have all library workers qualify for a "European Computer Driving License"(ECDL), the new European-wide qualification that enables people to demonstrate their competence in computer skills. At the time of his speech, 40,000 library staff had passed the test at a cost of £30 million. You can read more about the ECDL at: www.ecdl.co.uk/
Batt gave a demo of the new site (www.whichbook.net/),which allows a librarian or patron to indicate fiction book features such as whether they want to read a happy or sad book, a book that takes place in Asia or Africa, or a plot with a lot of conflict, and then the site will suggest a book based on this criteria. These particular selection choices apply only to fiction, but you could envision a similar idea for non-fiction books. The idea is for all of us to think beyond the card catalog/OPAC/subject-based model, and towards something that more resembles our patrons' questions.
You can read more about Chris Batt's work and the UK projects at the People's Network Web site at: www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk
Electronic journal management
A common theme at this conference, much like at any library conference in recent years, was how to handle access to electronic journals in your library. All libraries are struggling with how to provide access to electronic journals for their users: through the OPAC, through a separate alphabetical or searchable title list on the library Web site, or some combination of both, and how to manage these lists and keep the list and the URLs up-to-date. Third party vendors Serials Solutions, ExLibris, and EBSCO offer e-journal management solutions. Many libraries have decided that outsourcing this management is worth the cost of the service, since it is less than the cost it would be to manage this work within their own organization. Serials Solutions now offers the Full MARC Records service, providing CONSER-approved MARC records based on the electronic journal list provided by the library, ready for loading in your catalog. The cost of this service is perhaps too steep for some smaller libraries that have come up with their own brief cataloging records from their e-journals lists.
John Wynstra (University of Northern Iowa) presented his library's solution. UNI has 11,000 electronic titles with 14,000 access points (because some e-journals are provided by multiple vendors). They subscribe to Serials Solutions' A-to-Z journal list, which consists of every data item they needed to make a brief cataloging record (title, ISSN, start and end date of access,provider name, and URL). They wanted to somehow use this Serials Solutions list to create brief MARC records for their catalog, so Wynstra wrote a PERL script to do just that. The entire process only takes between six and 15 hours every two months, with the bulk of that time going to updating Serials Solutions with the latest list of their electronic journal subscriptions. The running of the PERL script, transforming the MARC records into an Innovative-readable file, and loading the records into the catalog only takes a few hours. These are only brief records, but if you do not have the budget to buy Full MARC Records and you want all your e-journals in your catalog, this is a good compromise. To see an example of one of the brief cataloging records created by this script, look at the electronic resource record: http://unistar.uni.edu/search/t?SEARCH=library+journal+1976.
Another problem caused by the proliferation of e-journals in libraries is how to manage these resources in your internal acquisitions and ordering systems. Currently, libraries are coming up with their own ideas on where to store electronic resource information in their ILS. There is no logical place to store information such as the license agreement, access restrictions, and the user name and password for a resource. Libraries have demanded a consistent and logical place to keep this information in the Innovative system. Specifically,they want to centralize storage and management of the resources, the new module needs to be flexible as the definitions and nature of electronic resources will change, and they want a better place to keep vendor information.
Innovative has responded by developing the new Electronic Resources Management Module (ERM), in collaboration with a few Innovative libraries and national library standards committees. Ted Fons, an Innovative product manager,presented the new module. This module introduces new record types in the system:a resource record, a license record (that can have a PDF of the license agreement attached), and the vendor record has been expanded to include more fields. Innovative has worked closely with Serials Solutions on the development of this module, so when you load in Full MARC Records, your Innovative resource record will automatically be updated.
Libraries will need to plan for these types of infrastructure changes in all integrated library systems, not just Innovative's. A major project for each library in the near future will be to gather the electronic resource information that you are keeping in various databases, print folders, and all over your ILS,and moving it into a consistent place in the new record types.
URL maintenance
The problem of URL maintenance in your library's OPAC extends beyond the management of e-journals and e-resources. Just as e-journals sometimes change locations, all the web links in your catalog need to be checked on a regular basis, as to not frustrate your patrons searching for something in your catalog. Innovative provides a link checker ("URLChecker") as part of the system,but as Mary Strouse of the Catholic University of America Law Library pointed out in her presentation, it has many limitations. It reports many "false negatives" (reported errors that are not really errors), such as all redirects are reported as an error. Many redirects are intentional, as the vendor-supplied Web site is used to authenticate you as a valid user through your IP address, and then you are automatically forwarded to the actual journal page. Other redirects that are not errors are all PURLs. Any library that is a government depository will have several thousand GPO PURLs in their catalog, all reported as errors by URLchecker. All these false errors make the error report quite cumbersome to sort through.
Tom Tyler of the University of Denver's Penrose Library followed up Mary Strouse's session with some solutions for libraries that are not happy with their ILS's link checker. He created a tool to extract URLs from all the MARC records in your catalog, creating a single Web page of these links that can be checked by other third party link checker software that is more robust than your library system's link checker. He recommended Xenu's LinkSleuth, a shareware product that can be downloaded here: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.htmlTyler's freeware tools for working with URLs in your catalog can be found here: www.du.edu/~ttyler/freeware/
Conclusion
This conference is definitely worth spending some of your travel budget on if you are hampered by the limitations of the Innovative ILS and want some ideas and solutions to make your work with the system easier and faster. The conference content was quite technical, so if you could only send one librarian to this conference, send your systems librarian or one of your more technically savvy librarians, as they will get the most out of the meeting. It was exciting to see how clever some librarians had been in their solutions and the conference inspired me to try several new ideas when I returned to the office.
The next annual meeting of the Innovative Users Group will be Boston,Massachusetts on April 2-5, 2004 at the Boston Marriott Copley Place.
Christina Hennessey(chennessey@lmu.edu) is the Serials Cataloging Librarian at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California, USA.
