Technically Speaking
 By David Dorman
American Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org
Library consultant for the Lincoln Trail Libraries System in Champaign, Illinois.
Column for February 2002
GIS Provides a New Way of
Seeing Service Areas
The quest to develop and market better ways to gather and present relevant statistics goes on. One emerging product to watch is LibraryDecision, developed by Civic Technologies. LibraryDecision is a geographic information system (GIS) application that can map library and demographic statistical data to latitude and longitude coordinates, creating maps that can relate patron, collection and circulation, and other library management data to census data down to the census-block level, as well as other state and local data, and then display their relationships visually.
A map created using LibraryDecision software.
Civic Technologies cut its teeth in library management statistics working with the County of Los Angeles Public Library. Using a suite of GIS software tools developed specifically for library management statistics, Civic Technologies helped the library develop a long-range plan to better serve its 3.5 million residents. The company is currently working with Redlands, California, a city of 75,000 residents, and its A. K. Smiley Public Library, to help the library in its facilities planning and service development.
“It’s a very visual technology,” said County of Los Angeles Public Library Assistant Director for Finance and Planning David Flint. “It’s tough to really understand the value of GIS technology until you actually see it and ‘drive around’ in it. When people do see it, they go ‘wow,’ and begin to think of all the data they could correlate visually that they never thought of before. For example, we were able to visualize the distribution of the Hispanic population in our service areas and correlate that with the percentage of Spanish-language books in each of the libraries in those service areas. Statistics make more sense and are easier to understand when you can see them mapped out, and at the same time create correlations on the fly among all the data you have collected. We are excited about the potential of GIS software for improving our planning and service delivery.”
As Civic Technologies develops a strategy to market its software and services to public libraries beyond the two in Southern California, it faces the challenge of creating a product that does not need to be extensively customized by its staff to be useful to library administrators and boards. “Our goal is to democratize GIS software as a library management tool,” says Civic Technologies President/CEO Marc Futterman. “Then libraries of all sizes will be able to use the software without paying for extensive customization.”
Futterman said the company will be demonstrating the first version of LibraryDecision that is capable of importing and displaying data without extensive customization at the PLA Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, next month, and will follow that up with a presence at ALA Annual Conference in Atlanta this June. The upcoming release of LibraryDecision will be based on ArcGIS, the newest GIS platform of the Environmental Systems Research Institute, the world’s largest supplier of GIS software. For more information about LibraryDecision, go to the Civic Technologies Web site.
Bibliostat Blues
Epixtech announced this past fall that it would no longer market or support Bibliostat, the statistical add-on package to the Dynix system that Management Dynamics once hoped to interface with a multitude of local systems. In September, Management Dynamics sold Bibliostat to Epixtech, but after an internal audit of the software, Epixtech concluded that it was not worth trying to maintain and decided to discontinue support as of the end of October 2001.
Bibliostat Collect and Bibliostat Connect, which Management Dynamics sold to Baker and Taylor, are still being actively marketed and widely used. The Collect product has been sold to more than 30 state libraries to help them gather statistics from public libraries and pass them on to the federal government, and the Connect product has been sold to about 20 state libraries and 50 individual public libraries to help them compare statistics among diverse public libraries.
Sirsi Sunsets DRA
After an internal audit of Unicorn software and Taos software, Sirsi has decided to focus its product development on its Unicorn Library Management System. The company found that Taos still lacked base-level ILS functionality and concluded that its best feature, the Taos client’s look and feel, could be rapidly incorporated into the Unicorn system.
Although Sirsi will not be developing Taos after the general release of Version 1.2, scheduled for February, the company is allowing Taos customers to choose between staying with Taos or migrating to Unicorn at any time at no additional cost. DRA Classic, Inlex, and MultiLIS customers will also have the choice of staying with their existing software or migrating to Unicorn, but if they choose migration they will be charged roughly the same cost that DRA would have charged them to migrate to Taos. Within a month or two, Sirsi expects to make the iBistro client available for all these other software platforms.
Sirsi reported that 4% of the combined Sirsi/DRA workforce has been laid off. A company spokesperson attributed the layoffs to duties no longer needed because they related to DRA’s status as a public company. The development staff of the combined company, which did not have any layoffs, is now three times as large as it was before Sirsi purchased DRA.
Contracts and Agreements
- Epixtech—with the Boston Public Library; the Upper Hudson Library System headquarters in Albany, New York, for 26 of its 29 member public libraries; and the El Paso (Tex.) Public Library, all for Horizon Sunrise systems to replace DRA systems; with Westminster Kingsway College in London, England, for Horizon Sunrise to replace an EOSi GLAS system; and with the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George, Canada, for Epixtech’s Resource Sharing System.
- Innovative Interfaces—with the University of Granada, Spain, for a Millennium system to replace a home-grown system; with the Metropolitan Borough of Bury, England, for a Millennium system to replace a homegrown system; with the University of Valladolid, Spain, for a Millennium system to replace a DOBIS/LIBIS system; and with the National Aerospace Institute of Spain in Madrid for a Millennium system to replace a Techlib system.
- Sirsi—with the Frederick County (Md.) Public Libraries, a system with six locations serving a population of 200,000, for the Unicorn Library Management System and iBistro Electronic Library, to replace a VTLS system; and with the Yosemite Community College District (YCCD) in Modesto, California, for a LINK system to replace Best Seller’s PortFolio system in the two colleges that comprise YCCD, Modesto Junior College and Columbia College.
- Gaylord Information Systems—with the Paulding County (Ohio) Carnegie Library, with four outlets serving a population of 20,000, to migrate from Gaylord’s Galaxy system to Polaris.
- Fretwell-Downing—with the California Digital Library, which serves the 10 campuses of the University of California system, for software to add to the university’s suite of ILL software tools, to add new functionality and increase the integration of ILL workflow.
Vendor Announcements
- OCLC has completed ISO ILL testing and its ILLiad interlibrary loan management software is now fully compliant with ISO ILL standards. The company has also announced its intention to release SiteSearch as an open-source product for use by nonprofit organizations.
- H. W. Wilson announced that its Education Full Text Database now has 239 full-text journals and an additional 288 indexed titles.
Alliances and Acquisitions
- Gaylord Information Systems has announced partnerships with Web Fee for preselected Internet resources and with Syndetics Solutions for enhanced bibliographic data.
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