This week, I looked at Regina Beach and Miqueas Dial’s article “Building a collection development CMS on a shoe-string,” which discusses a collection-specific CMS project at the Texas A&M University-Kingsville (TAMUK) Library, serving 5,000 students. TAMUK is a small campus and did not have the financial means to easily improve their collection development by purchasing commercial software and having a full-time tech team, so they decided to create one in-house from scratch.
The authors specifically wanted to develop this system to adequately support distance students at the school. The first step was changing the technical services workflow so that data only had to be entered once when faculty requested books through the database. The database was created in MS Access and the relationships behind the scenes look like this:
The authors specifically wanted to develop this system to adequately support distance students at the school. The first step was changing the technical services workflow so that data only had to be entered once when faculty requested books through the database. The database was created in MS Access and the relationships behind the scenes look like this:
While what the faculty sees look like this:
As of publication (2005), this system was still in prototype testing and it was unclear whether or not the resources would be available to fully implement the system. The authors found that while development and completion of the CMS database was accomplished in a timely fashion, implementation in the library has been slow because of negotiating security issues.
It was interesting hearing about this endeavor and the challenges that it presented. I hadn't really thought about security issues yet, so I plan to explore this aspect of collection management a bit more in creating my collection repository.
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