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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 April 2003

Streaming Music @ Your Library

It had to happen and it finally did: A company has introduced a streaming service for libraries that delivers music to patrons via the Internet. Called Classical.com, the company rolled out a play list of over 3,100 classical recordings representing more than 2,500 titles this past November and is in negotiations to obtain licenses for significantly more. Authenticated users of the service can play works either at the library, in their homes, or, if they are wireless road warriors, just about anywhere.

The United Kingdom-based company also announced its intention to create an audio reserves service that would allow libraries to put audio works on the Classical.com Web site, where they would then be available “on reserve” for students to listen to under fair use guidelines. At the end of the semester the works would be deleted.

The minimum cost of the service is $1,000, which gets the library three simultaneous users. Additional user licenses cost approximately $300 per year. Discounts are available for K–12 schools. The audio reserves service, which is optional, has not yet been priced. I am told that the ability to provide catalog records is in the works. The Web site is www.classical.com.

More Digestable Serials

Struggling to maintain and extend access to serial publications is enough to give any collection development librarian severe indigestion these days. Prices for science, technology, and medical journals are outrageously high; title overlap rates among competing aggregators cost libraries precious dollars; and users increasingly expect that full-text access should always be just a click away from the article citation. While market solutions for these and other challenges to journal access may be slow and imperfect, they are coming.

“Copyright transfer agreements that scholars sign as part of the ‘publication process’ remove control of content from authors and academe and give it to commercial entities. These commercial entities then have the right to set access fees and terms in ways that maximize their own profits, and drain rather than benefit academe,” writes Kate Thomes, head of the Bevier Engineering Library at the University of Pittsburgh. Not a week goes by without my getting at least one press release from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) with news of yet another nonprofit publication initiative or a new peer-reviewed, science-related journal midwifed by SPARC to compete with a high-priced commercial journal. If these are the twilight days of colossal profit margins like Elsevier Sciences’s 33.1% last year, no small credit will go to the efforts of SPARC. Check out www.arl.org/sparc/ for details of the great work they are doing to make scholarly information available to libraries at affordable prices.

Serials Solutions and other companies with similar products do a nice job of giving library patrons a publicly accessible listing of the journal titles available in full text in all formats at their library. Now Bowker has come out with a serials collection analysis system to help a library compare its holdings to the entire Ulrich’s database of 175,000 active serials titles. Once a library has loaded its accessible journal titles into Ulrich’s Serials Analysis System, the system can analyze the collection and recommend deselection as well as purchasing recommendations. It compares ISI Impact Factor ratings, which are a measure of the importance of a journal in its field, and links to reviews from Katz’s Magazines for Libraries.

A planned upgrade of the service will enable a library to populate the system with many of its available journal titles simply by indicating what aggregator services the library subscribes to. To learn more about the Serials Analysis System, go to www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/.

Contracts and agreements

Ex Libris—with the British Library in London, for an Aleph system, MetaLib/SFX and DigiTool, to manage the library’s 150-million item collection, replacing a variety of custom-built systems. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; the University of Tennessee at Knoxville; the Bavarian State Library and Bavarian Library Consortium (BVB), headquartered in Munich and consisting of about 77other libraries; the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California; and the United States Army Military History Institute of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, are all acquiring Aleph 500 systems, MetaLib, and SFX to replace an Epixtech Notis ILS and an Innovative acquisitions system, an Epixtech Horizon ILS and a Geac acquisitions system, a custom-built union catalog, an Innovative Innopac system, and a Dynix Horizon system respectively. The FinELib consortium will use Meta-Lib and SFX to create a national portal service for Finland, the first phase of which involves the national library implementing the project in the country’s 20 universities.

Innovative Interfaces—with the San Francisco Public Library; the Minuteman Library Network, consisting of 35 public and 6 academic libraries west of Boston; the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania; Hope College in Holland, Michigan; the Somerset (N. J.) County Library System for the system’s nine locations; the St. Louis Research Libraries Consortium, for its three members, the Missouri Botanical Garden Library, the St. Louis Art Museum Library, and the Missouri Historical Society; the University of Warwick in Coventry, England; De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines; and the Universidade de Beira Interior in Covilhã, Portugal: all for Millennium systems to replace four Sirsi DRA systems, two Dynix systems, a VTLS Classic system, TLC’s ITS.MARC and Net.PAC, a Talis system, an EOSi T-Series system, and a locally developed system respectively.

Endeavor—with CONZULSys, a consortium of four New Zealand university libraries, for Voyager, Encompass LinkFinderPlus, and ILL services, to replace two Epixtech Dynix Systems, a Sirsi DRA system, and a Civica Spydus system.

TLC—with the Denton (Tex.) Independent School District; Milton (Mass.) Academy; Bristol Washington Township (Ind.) Library; Dallas Independent School District; Margaret E. Heggan Free Public Library in Hurffville, New Jersey; Waterloo Grant–Township (Ind.) Public Library; Kendallville (Ind.) Public Library; and the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey Bay, California, all for Library.Solution systems to replace four Dynix systems, a Sagebrush Spectrum system, two Civica Spydus systems, and a Sirsi Unicorn system. The Charlestown–Clark County (Ind.) Public Library; Tusculum College in Greenville, Tennessee; the George Coon Public Library in Princeton, Kentucky; Doniphan (Mo.) Public Library; Fleming County Public Library in Flemingsburg, Kentucky; Colleyville (Tex.) Public Library; and the Bath County Memorial Library in Owingsville, Kentucky; all for Library.Solution as first-time automation systems.

Sirsi—with the Intellectual Property Australia library in Woden, Australian Capital Territory, for a Unicorn system to replace an Infovision Data*Library system; and with the Gold Coast City Council Library Service in Queensland, Australia, for a Unicorn system for the library’s 14 branches, to replace a Dynix system.

Gaylord Information Systems—with the Laurel County Public Library in London, Kentucky, for a Polaris system to replace the library’s Brodart Amlib system.

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