Creating JAMIE

CREATING JAMIEAt the North of England Institute of Mining and

Mechanical Engineers Library, Newcastle upon Tyne

IntroductionJennifer 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 JAMIEMember of NEBytes (Newcastle based technology group) – close ties with local universitiesSystems Analyst specialising in systems deployments

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

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

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

Problems Poor data – Author database, Subjects

list. Learning MARC Broadband speed Improving KOHA - database

performance Migration

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)

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 recordsRecords would “disappear” or alter themselves due to the application closing faster than it can save the file the user is working on

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

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

Difficulty curveEasy• 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

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)

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

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

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

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)

OPAC view

http://opac.mininginstitute.org.uk

LMS view

LMS record view

Contact uswww.mininginstitute.org.uk

Jennifer Kelly (Librarian):librarian@mininginstitute.org.uk@mininglibrarian0191 2332459

James Watson (IT):james.watson@mininginstitute.org.uk0191 2332459