CUFTS: Open-Source ERMS Andy Perry and Bill Drew SUNY New Paltz Tompkins Cortland Community College

What is it? Open source serials management Alternative to commercial solutions Electronic resource management Public A-Z list of journals Open url/DOI link resolving (GODOT) Overlap reports MARC record management and output

About CUFTS Developed at Simon Fraser University (Canada). Central instance hosting over 30 libraries at SFU Many instances installed world-wide Libraries can join the hosted central instance for a reasonable fee or download and install the system locally for free as open source DIY. Designed to host multiple libraries as separate “sites”. CUFTS is based on perl and PostgreSQL on linux. Ubuntu is preferred over Red Hat. I have no idea what the acronym stands for!

CUFTS Features All the services driven by a knowledge base of e-resources and titles belonging to those e-resources. Knowledge Base now contains 464 resources and almost 586,000 title records, updated monthly, and distributed by the central SFU instance. Each CUFTS library sharing an instance has its own “Local Resources” – Point to a global resource in the knowledge base – Can be unique to the library and not part of the knowledge base – Can include print resources

Different sites share one instance

CUFTS Local Resources Site Specific Easy to “activate” resources from the Knowledge Base. – Title lists maintained automatically as KB is updated Partial subscriptions like ScienceDirect are handled by activating specific titles or by batch load of issn’s to match the Knowledge Base Can include print subscription information Can load title lists for resources not in the Global KB

Example of Partial Title Activation Load issn …

License Information Linked to “Local Resources”

Lots of Perl scripts “update_cjdb.pl” builds A-Z list “title_list_updater.pl updates KB if a new resource is added I haven’t tried all of them!

CJDB—CUFTS A-Z List Provides public access to e-journals Derived from “local resources” in CUFTS Highly customizable—template editor part of CUFTS Also features user accounts and user tagging Indexing not real time—need to run update_cjdb.pl script when adding a new resource

Very Basic Public A-Z List Title display

SFU’s Nicely Tricked out Customized A-Z list

E-Resource Comparison

cufts2marc Public version available at Outputs MARC or XML for titles in e-resource aggregations Options for mapping holdings data to tag (could be further manipulated to MARC holding tag) Free option for adding bibliographic records for e- resources for ILS or for adding level 2-3 holdings in OCLC

Cufts2marc Form: mapping e-journal holdings

Journal Authority—shows availability of specific title by aggregator

“Researcher” includes a suite of open source library systems

The Big Questions and Issues CUFTS is a big system. It scales more effectively for a consortium than for an individual library. – More libraries mean a better Knowledge Base – Learning/implementing all the functions and scripts How to make it fit with a partial implementation of Serials Solutions 360 Core and 360 Link. – 2 knowledge bases, 2 title lists – Activation or cancellation of e-resources in 2 systems – Not an accounting system Once the data is all there, how do we use it effectively and get rid of the other spreadsheets and shadow systems. They’re all still there! What reports will be useful? Best as a regional solution.

Stranack, K. (2006, November). CUFTS: An Open Source Alternative for Serials Management. Serials Librarian, 51(2), Retrieved October 8, 2008, from Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts database. Questions?/ Thank you! Bill Drew Andy Perry