Hi all,

The project of which I am proudest is our library's Journals the Library
Has list; it does essentially the same sorts of things that
SerialsSolutions does, but I developed it right around the same time the SS
was getting off the ground in 1998, and managed to stay ahead of them in
development for a little while. The especially groovy things about this
database are:
         * easy to maintain: most of the data is harvested by scripts, so
it's pretty easy to keep up-to-date
         * integrates our print holdings -- not with MARC records like we
could buy from SS for thousands of dollars, but good enough
         * it's pretty easy to compare the contents of a potential new full
text journal database against the list of what we already have
         * it is essentially free. living in the fine state of Ohio, and
belonging to the OhioLINK consortium, we have access to about 13000
electronic journals even though we're a small (2000 FTE) university. The
SerialsSolutions price for managing our volume of data would be more than
10% of my salary, and now that the service is developed, I spend a lot less
than 10% of my time maintaining it. Usually less than an hour per month.
Plus an hour or so whenever we get a new database requiring a new loader.

Once upon a time this was my first real serious Perl project (searching on
a flat file database, back when we only had 4000 titles). Now it's all in
PHP and MySQL, although the harvesting scripts are mostly still in Perl
since the job is largely one of reformatting text data.

My current ambition is to build some tools that will help out with
cooperative collection development projects. I expect it will involve
Z39.50, about which I know nothing. I'll come back to the list with
specific questions when they've formed sufficiently that I can ask a
meaningful question...

joy
Ken


Ken Irwin                                               [log in to unmask]
Reference/Electronic Resources Librarian        (937) 327-7594
Thomas Library, Wittenberg University