Sender: Rare Books and Special Collections Forum <EXLIBRIS@RUTVM1.BITNET>
Since I can't remember whether this discussion originated on
EXLIBRIS or ARCHIVES, I am sending it to both with the
thought that it may be of interest to people on both lists.
When the Special Collections Department at Duke was
investigating an automated collection use/patron
registration system to track usage of its manuscript
collections, the circulation system in use in the rest of
the library was summarily dismissed as being of such limited
and misdirected functionality that it was virtually useless
for our needs. Instead, we used a very neat bit of dbms
software called DataEase, which has the principle advantage
of being very friendly to those of us who happen to believe
that there is more to life than writing thousands of line of
code. From this software we have designed a system that
registers all users of our manuscript collections, neatly
classifying them into students, faculty, non-Duke faculty,
other, etc. and categorizing their research interests by the
use of 30 or so broad subject categories based on our
collection strengths. This database is linked to a
sub-system which records all collection use, calling up
collection names and locations from a shelflist in the
system. This permits us to develop all manner of reports
from daily or monthly registration figures to "Top 50"
collections used to customized lists by patron of all the
materials they consulted to "who was the last person to use
this collection?" Many of these reports are on a menu;
others can be easily developed through using a very
straightforward SQL menu that DataEase provides. We are in
the process of converting our accession/collection
management database into DataEase so that the two systems
can be linked at crucial points (the shelflist for example).
Finally, the most attractive feature of the whole system is
that it is sitting on the library network Novell fileserver,
from which it can be accessed by any networked PC in the
department.
Steve Hensen
Special Collections Department
Duke University Library
slh@mail.lib.duke.edu.bitnet
919/684-3372