"Moving from a Card Catalog to Going Online" Steve Sowder *

Introduction Moving from a card catalog to an online system requires much planning and the work of more than one person. Creating a Library Steering Committee can facilitate this process and spread the work load around. It is advisable to solicit the ideas of others and "negotiate" some of the decisions. Some issues to be settled. Do you want the online system to be an Integrated Library System (ILS)? An ILS incorporates the acquisitions, cataloging, patron records, periodicals, and circulation. Such systems can be purchased by modules. Your use of an ILS may be limited to acquisitions and the catalog. Do you have a local network in place and will the catalog be available at all computers in the school? If so, your local gurus, that setup and maintain the network, will need to be involved. The local guru(s) may also be willing to tackle one of the open-source ILS's that are available. Probably the best known of these is Koha. If you do not want an ILS but just the "catalog online" then the same local guru(s) may be able to help provide and maintain a program that can be used to search your list of titles using a web browser. In the future, a locally developed database can usually be used as a starting point to create records for an ILS. Going online does not necessarily mean that online has to be at your school. Some ILS providers can host your collection at their site and you and your students access it via the Internet.

A general outline of the project follows: A. Form a library steering committee     1. Budget and/or fund-raising     2. What people resources are available     3. Select software provider         a. A commercial Integrated Library Software (ILS) (Appendix A)         b. Shareware software (Appendix B)         c. Locally home-grown system. This is more likely limited to a catalog             only and will require a local guru     4. Enter data for software         a. A commercial provider may be able to take information directly from             your current card catalog and enter the data.             They may also be able to import data from your spreadsheet, access             database, SQL, MySQL, or a proprietary database.             All for a fee of course, but may be negotiated when buying the             vendors software.         b. Data entry for shareware and local will have to be entered or             converted from an existing file. See your guru. B. Creating a file of holdings If creating a local list, this may start with a computer readable list of accessions. Computer readable means that a computer program can read the file and can tell the difference between each book, and each field (Author, Title, Subject) within the book entry. A minimum of fields should be Author, Title, Subjects, and Call Number (see Note 1). Other fields that would be nice are Accession Number, Location (or room number), Year of Publication, format (Hardback/Paperback), ISBN, and any other fields of local interest (ie Donor name). One possible use would be fields from the Dublin Core (Appendix D) or a limited verison of it. This information could be entered into a spreadsheet, access database, or a locally defined system (ie web page). Note: 1. Call Number is not essential for a small library. Items could be kept on the shelves by subject order and then by authors last name. The first or main subjects used should be from a controlled list that is by Dewey Decimal Number. (See Appendix C).

            Appendix A: Selected Commercial Integrated Lib. Software Systems

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Alexandria COMPanion	www.goalexandria.com	Win98SE/2000/XP	$8,000 with retro conversion
Book Systems Concourse	www.booksys.com	Win95/98/2000	$10,000 with retro conversion
Brodart Amlib Library Management	www.brodart.com	.	.
Chancery LibraryPro	www.chancery.com	Win, Mac	.
Dynix Horizon School Library Suite	www.dynix.com	.	.
Follett Software Destiny	www.fsc.follett.com	Win 2000/2003	.
Mandarin M3	www.mlasolutions.com	.	.
Sagebrush Athena	www.sagebrushcorp.com	Win 95/98/NT/ 2000/XP/Novell	$9,575 with retro conversion
Sagebrush Winnebago Spectrum	www.sagebrushcorp.com	Win NT/2000 Novell Mac	$11,000 with retro conversion
Sirsi Library Management System Unicom	www.sirsi.com	.	.
Softlink America Alice	www.softlinkamerica.com	Win	free license, pay annual support, downloadable trial version
TLC Library Solution	www.tlcdelivers.com	.	Also has a White Paper Guide for Planning Automation

      Based on the article "Library Automation: A Buying Guide" by Kathy Shrock in Technology and Learning,
      February 2004. Additional information supplied by this author.

Appendix B:  Selected open-source Integrated Library Systems Greenstone (check this 2.) Koha (check this one 1.) phpmylibrary (and this 3.)

Appendix C:   Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) of Subjects 000 - Computers, Information, General Reference 100 - Philosophy, Psychology 200 - Religion 300 - Social Sciences 400 - Language 500 - Science 600 - Technology 700 - Arts, Recreation 800 - Literature 900 - History, Geography Add to the subjects listed above keeping within the general Dewey Number. See http://www.tnrdlib.bc.ca/dewey.html A good introduction to the DDC for the non-librarians on your committee is at http://www.mtsu.edu/~vvesper/dewey.html#Dewey

Appendix D:   Elements of the Dublin Core Title Creator Subject Description Publisher Contributor Date Type Format Identifier Source Language Relation Coverage Rights Detailed information about each element is at http://dublincore.org/documents/dces