ILS (Midwinter Meeting demos)

Of the ILS I looked at this time, one I particularly like is Innovative Interface (III). Their product is Millennium and new OPAC is Encore. Encore seemed intuitive to use, tagging capability and navigation on the side for material type from results screen. The rep equated the OPAC navigation to social networking. University of Michigan State uses this product. Millennium has a toolbar on the desktop with icons for the different modules (Circ, Cat, etc.). Also, many of the functions could be done from the Web. MARC records in Cat module has free text option. One caveat- have a certain number of user licenses, so staff would need to remember to close the module to have enough available throughout the system. According to the rep, there would be enough licenses for the number of staff.

I am still on the fence about Polaris. They’re not bad, I’m just not 100% sold on it being user-friendly; someone else might think differently. In any case, they are getting more academic libraries using their product. The rep said about 10% are academics and are a “very vocal group”. Toolbar on the desktop with icons for the modules. Pretty basic staff end, but I think some of the icons might be confusing- particularly for the assistants. One nice feature in the Circ module- items can be tracked by campus (returned at X campus, shipped to X campus).

I looked at Virtua which is one of the VTLS products. Same type of toolbar, although this one has small icon groups for each of the 4 modules. In Circ, the patron record looks like a MARC record, but the tags could be changed to have words instead of tag numbers (“Name”). The web OPAC is iPortal and is customizable. At this point I stopped the rep because she said it was “easy to do” by the librarian. I wanted to clarify that we would have tech support and not having to do all this customization! She brought in another rep and there are a number of options. From out of the box where we would control everything, to them controlling, and for anywhere in between.

We know we like TLC but they are lots of $$$$.

All of these are compatible with Connexion.

I wasn’t able to look any Endeavor products, since they were not at Midwinter.