Periodical Management Systems
A while ago I mentioned that I had written an article for Serials Review on periodical management systems, and that I had been working for quite some time on such a system at my library. This topic continues to be of interest to a lot of folks. Recently there have been two or three threads on SERIALST related to this issue in which the predominant opinion seems to be that Serials Solutions walks on water. I haven’t used their services — the whole point of developing something locally is/was to do what they or competing services do for cheaper and do it better — but they seem to get consistently good press!
I have a meeting on Friday with a subset of PALNI libraries to demonstrate what we’ve been doing locally with this homegrown system. My hope is that at least a few other libraries within our consortium will join in using it. One good reason is that we all share SFX and the Taylor Periodical Administration System integrates SFX data, making it somewhat distinctive from other setups I’ve read about. My ultimate hope is to make the system freely available as open source because I believe that there are many libraries out there who simply can’t afford services from Serials Solutions, TDNet, Ebsco, and others. I think this is particularly true of many small college and university libraries, as well as some public libraries. A huge amount of credit for the whole system goes to one of my student workers, Matt Wissman, who has worked on it for over two years now. He is really gifted in database design, advanced web development, and other areas, and I am really going to miss him when he graduates next year.
