2008-01-09

Serials Management, the last conversion

This week we hope to start using our new serials management application. The last application that is still running on our old system. Cardex, the name of the application, is now based on the new CMS. It is entirely build using XSLT, some javascript and a bit of perl that does background printing and emailing of claims for missing issues or stagnating subscriptions. The old version, which has been used until now was build in 1982 (to be honest, the first patch of the code dates back to november 1982, so I presume 1982 must have been the year it was born). It was based on Minisis and written in SPL, a Pascal like proprietary programming language for the HP3000 series computers. Although the application was old, it had evolved over the years and people were pretty happy with it. We kept the same application properties, but the application, a web application now, has got a completely different look and feel. It now has all the old features and some more. Next step is to put in new functionality concerning electronic subscriptions or to integrate it with components for this, so called Electronic Resource Management (ERM) systems. The problem is, that I have not seen systems that make the connection with traditional serials management systems, which is quite strange, especially since subscriptions are often paper plus digital content (ok, it is changing). They do integrate with Open URL resolvers and sometimes with cataloging components. It feels like these systems force to separate paper and electronic serials management, just like in most systems, cataloging digital content (in meta search portals and OpenURL systems) is separated from traditional cataloguing of paper content in a ILS. Vendors have not split up their traditional ILS's into components yet.
For now I think we have to built these features ourselves. So far, no Dutch library I know has implemented a ERM system. Am I wrong ?

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