Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal December 2007 Volume 5(6)

Health libraries

All systems go

Andrew Jackson continues his account of implementing a unified library management system for Scottish health libraries, going live in February.

The ULMS Working Group was established in September 2005, with a remit to formulate policies on cataloguing and indexing, inter-library lending, the evaluation of shortlisted systems, and the final recommendation of a preferred system. In the main, membership was made up of NHS Scotland library staff. Having sought the advice from Gordon Dunsire at the CDLR during the Horizon implementation across the Glasgow Colleges Group in 2003, and given his vast knowledge of both practical and strategic matters, I asked him to sit on the Group as an external consultant. Also invited was Lynn Corrigan, Information Systems Manager at Napier University, for her expertise in library systems and health-related library services.

One of the key decisions was how to approach subject indexing. As with most aspects of existing systems and practices, there was no unified approach. MARC authority records were not used, due to the absence of MARC cataloguing. Those services which dealt with NHS management or public health did not favour a clinical thesaurus, but rather ones which were perceived as being more user-friendly.

It was essential that we agreed on a core scheme to allow for effective searching across the entire database, and the decision was made to go with MeSH. Only two existing schemes would be retained: the topical keyword list as used by the three Health Promotion services in the project, and the Department of Health Data Thesaurus as used by the Health Management Library.

It was a far easier decision to move into the MARC 21 cataloguing environment, with as many records as possible to be matched and upgraded with MARC records from the National Library of Medicine catalogue and other available sources.

The tender
For our Operational Requirements document (the point by point specification of what we wanted the system to do), I visited nearly all of the 42 libraries (including Shetland, as I happened to be there on holiday) in order to meet library staff and get an accurate sense of their existing data and any requirements unique to that service. No less important was the opportunity to make those human connections which reinforce commitment and responsibility on both sides of the project table: system implementation is as much a social process as it is a technical one, if not more so. I was acutely aware that I was about to change the daily practices (and daily mood) of 60-70 library staff across the country. The only way to achieve success was by working in close partnership, and with as much good humour as we could muster.

Responses to tender were invited via the European Journal in April 2006. Six library system vendors replied, some with ring binders as large as breeze blocks, some with suspiciously slim-looking folders, and the gruelling task of marking each one began. We wanted a shortlist of three or four vendors. After two weeks of point-counting and weighting, we were left with three front runners.

In November 2006, our three shortlisted vendors were invited to demonstrate their systems over three days each: the first two days were to cover basic functionalities, attended by library staff, and the third day to focus on technical issues surrounding NHS network security and server set-up. We were looking for a vendor who had clearly understood the nature of the service environment, who had committed their energies in providing solutions to our requirements, and who had a system capable of managing a consortium-style group of services with a multi-layered, ‘internal’ inter-lending workflow. Above all, it had to be a company we felt we could work with.

Vendor demonstrations are a challenge: how to see through the sales pitch, how to spot a potentially thorny issue being glossed over. One vendor, in a momentary lapse of restraint, described their UK implementation schedule as being like “a sausage factory”. Needless to say, I didn’t much like the idea of being a sausage.

In the end, thankfully, there was a clear first choice as recommended by the Working Group: the Aleph library management system from Ex Libris. Its inter-library loan module had the capacity to manage mediated ILLs between Health Boards, with normal request functionalities operating within each Board. The bookable-items functionality was essential to Health Promotion services, and Aleph was unique in being able to offer Z-targets on a combination of elements, e.g. a single collection, a single library, a Health Board group of libraries, a group of Health Promotion libraries across different Boards. With so many services involved, the ability to target specific elements of the database was essential.

The groundwork
With 42 services about to migrate onto a single system, it was necessary to ensure that each and every item of stock had a unique barcode. Some services used the same barcodes supplied by Heritage, and therefore the potential for duplicates existed; some services had no barcodes on their stock at all.

With limited time available before data export, and with services being one-person operations in the main, we decided to employ students from Strathclyde University’s library course to visit each site and undertake the laborious job of barcoding or re-barcoding all the stock and updating the information on current systems. The new barcodes were taken from a single stock order, and thus guaranteed unique. In some cases, the students would also transfer data from card catalogues into an Access file.
The other key necessity was staff training. Services were facing a new system and a new world of cataloguing practice. In order to prepare them for the new environment, I wrote a six-part cataloguing course covering the basics of AACR2 and MARC 21, with exercises to be returned for assessment and comment. One of the great pleasures of this project has been to contribute to professional development in this way, and to see library staff reviving the skills they left behind in library school.

The implementation
The particular problems caused for library systems within the NHS network were outlined in my previous article. A solution was achieved – after almost a year of internal discussion with NHS security staff in Edinburgh, IT consultancy, and recommendations from the Ex Libris project team. The servers are to be hosted by Atos Origin in Livingston, a company with close links to NHS services, and with their own link into the N3 network.

A single database server is fronted by two application/web servers: one on the N3 side, one on the Internet side. Although linked, a combination of Atos firewalls and DMZs ensure that the Internet-side server can generate the online catalogue and receive incoming Z39.50 requests (and provide client connectivity for the two non-NHS libraries on the project) without compromising the N3 network. Clients installed within NHS libraries are then connecting to the N3 server directly on the N3 network, thus avoiding the unreliable and unmanageable Internet connections (via Citrix clients) which have dogged similar projects in NHS England in the past.

The Systems Librarian
By the middle of 2006, it was clear to me that I could either implement a library system across 42 sites on my own or retain my treasured sanity. I recommended creating the post of Systems Librarian. Fortunately, we gained one of the best system librarians in the country: Judith Smart, previously at National Museums Scotland, and before that, the V&A.

Data programming by Ex Libris on 42 catalogues was prohibitively expensive, in project terms. Judith took on the task of creating a mere two data sets: one drawn from the Heritage systems, and one set from all the rest. This involved a huge amount of mapping work and data manipulation. Judith is also a master of UNIX-level database administration (what I like to call The Dark Side) and has ensured the successful implementation of Aleph in a fiendishly difficult network environment. The final reality of this project is a testament to her skill and experience.

The second data load has just begun, with cataloguing and circulation training almost complete. The system is due to go live in February, with the online catalogue to be branded as Shelcat (Scottish Health Libraries Catalogue). For a sneak preview of the work in progress, visit www.shelcat.org – log in as Guest, and click the Databases option in the top toolbar to search the various data sets, SHL01 being the union catalogue view.

Andrew Jackson is Senior Information Manager, Knowledge Services Group, NHS Education for Scotland. andrew.jackson@nes.scot.nhs.uk

Information Scotland Vol. 5(6) December 2007

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