1. At the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers Library, Newcastle upon Tyne

2. Jennifer Kelly – Mining Institute Librarian (MCLIP) Qualified librarian with strong understanding of the NEIMME collections. No previous experience of specifying LMS or database design! James Watson – Mining Institute Systems Administrator (v) Technical Architect of JAMIE Member of NEBytes (Newcastle based technology group) – close ties with local universities Systems Analyst specialising in systems deployments

3. North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers  Specialist reference library - 65,000 items on the catalogue.  Diverse collections: Books, journal runs, archives, objects, maps and photos.  Five libraries in one.  12,000+ volunteer hours/year

4. Previous LMS problems  Old system malfunctioned on a regular basis  Data was not being saved  “Ghost records” held on client machines  Could not see our data outside the software  High maintenance fee for practically zero support

5. Problems  Support’s solution was to upgrade (£15,000+).  Or £2,500+ to come out and look at our database and correct any errors due to a failure of validation rules by their software  Support told us our problems were caused by our configuration

6. Problems  Poor data – Author database, Subjects list.  Learning MARC  Broadband speed  Improving KOHA - database performance  Migration

7. Problems (images) Database was held in multiple CSV files (A BIG NO NO) – We could only open in Excel and specialised custom written applications (Was not fully Excel compatible) Passwords held in PLAIN TEXT! Database files overlapping (cause of corruption, reason we use databases to store data NOT flat CSV files)

8. Problems Database corruption As we were instructed to run as an Administrator user on the server - we could remotely take control of our system by adding commands to an CSV file or by Web Connect (huge security risk) Ghost records Records would “disappear” or alter themselves due to the application closing faster than it can save the file the user is working on

9. Why Open Source?  Implement our own solution  Less cost / More time trade-off  Chance to look at our own problems and fix them  Stop these problems happening again  Stop us being held in a contract with practically non-existent support  Stop us being locked in

10. How we did it  Started off looking at what we needed - tests  Worked closely with a local university, a company and lots of volunteers  Came up with an idea for minimum maintenance server on Windows  “Branched” off Koha and Evergreen for Windows  Got to work on implementation

11. Difficulty curve Easy Koha on Windows Web Interface Scalable Design Hard Evergreen modules on Windows Programming scripts and modules to do what we need to do (modifications) Getting what we needed out of both packages Extremely Difficult KOHA performance improvements Ensuring at least 99% of data is successfully transferred into MARC code

12. How we did it  Specialised module linking Koha that converts NON-MARC code (txt, ini, CSV) into MARC-XML compliant code  Any that fail are outputted separately to a file for manual conversion  MARC (Librarian friendly) – XML (IT Friendly)

13. Logical separation of items Frontend to website / library visitors to perform searches For library staff and volunteers to create, edit, delete authorities, records and items Conversion tools to convert non MARC compliant data into converted MARC-XML complaint records Manages the server and the technical aspects of the software (updates, upgrades) with administrative capabilities over the database

14. How it works  Excellent  Supports a larger record set and less problems  Continually improving  Supports importing of non-compliant records and converts them in a 3 layer staging pattern from older system (KOHA normally has 2 stage) Conversion, application and import

15. Costs  £900 hardware  £150 p.a. server licensing  £4,600 p.a. private support  £20,000 Volunteer time  c.£6,000 p.a. per site

16. Performance  After performance enhancements, faster than standard KOHA  Includes features that are mandatory for specialised libraries (record vs series collection)  Worked on from a practical standpoint (not theoretical ideals, just practical usage)  CILIP UKCS v3 compliant (standards)

17. OPAC view http://opac.mininginstitute.org.uk

18. LMS view

19. LMS record view

20. Contact us www.mininginstitute.org.uk  Jennifer Kelly (Librarian): librarian@mininginstitute.org.uk @mininglibrarian 0191 2332459  James Watson (IT): james.watson@mininginstitute.org.uk 0191 2332459