Heritage Special Library Case Study
The introduction of a Serials Management module to the Heritage Library Management System in 1997 meant that many special libraries, from corporate/workplace libraries to charities and institutions, were finally able to benefit from the value for money that Heritage offers. Heritage is now one of the market leaders in this sector and IS Oxford are keen to ensure that the future development of the product takes into consideration the needs of these customers.
ARUP
Originally founded by Danish engineer Ove Arup in 1946, Arup is now one of the leading engineering organisations in the world, employing more than 6,500 people internationally with an annual turnover exceeding £280 million. Better known for involvement with many of the high profile buildings of the post-war years, Arup has made a name for itself in many other aspects of engineering from roads and bridges to indestructible flasks for transporting nuclear waste.
Arup
have a number of offices around the UK, with a main library
located at the London office. This library holds over 150,000
items, including books, pamphlets, CDs and serials.
Julian Dawson, the librarian at Arup’s London office, began his search for a replacement library system in January 2002, when he visited the British Library Exhibition for Small and Special Libraries in London. He had seen Heritage previously at the Library Resources Exhibition in 1997, but it was not until the decision was made to replace DB Textworks, Arup’s existing system, that he investigated further.
Julian identified three management systems that would potentially suit the requirements of his library and invited the suppliers to give on-site demonstrations to both himself and his library staff. He had a number of criterion upon which he assessed each system, including “reliability, ease of use, good functionality, value for money [and] good support” and had prioritised “robustness and level of support” as the most important factors.
Julian was impressed with both the sophistication and price
of Heritage, and after reviewing all the short listed systems
he invited IS Oxford back to discuss their specific requirements
in more detail. This meeting enabled each of the library staff
to satisfy themselves that Heritage would meet their 
individual
requirements. IS Oxford then provided an evaluation copy of
the software for the library staff to trial. Confident that
the testing had gone well, Julian decided to go ahead with
Heritage.
“[Heritage] did most of what we wanted far more cheaply than other systems. We liked the approach of the company, and its ethos; and its commitment to the customer.”
Heritage was installed at Arup in April 2002. “[The] installation process was very straightforward. The Server Performance Pack service proved more of a problem, but support was able to spend time sorting this out. Configurations of some PCs had to be changed, but not a serious issue.”
Julian and his staff had a number of training sessions, which they found to be “generally very good” and they have arranged more for the future. They have also made use of the support line, which they initially found to be too slow “when our system is down and therefore support requirement is urgent”. This issue was addressed with IS support staff, and together with Julian they have “established ways to improve things from both sides”. IS staff are proud of their support reputation and are very keen to offer the best service possible, so a variety of methods of support are available (e.g. via telephone, email, the Internet etc) to cater for individual needs. They continually monitor the effectiveness of our support service and welcome customer feedback as part of this process.
Despite
only having Heritage for a few months to date, Julian has
already noticed an improvement in the Arup library:
“The area of loans circulation is vastly improved. We would hope to see similar benefits when we implement our acquisitions and serials management.
“We are still pretty much in the early days of implementation and learning. There is still a large amount of work to do post-conversion in terms of tidying up and correcting the data. So, this is really an initial response. Ask us again in twelve months!”
Arup run Heritage on Windows 2000.
They currently have ten additional full access licences, the
Serials Management Module (including
Acquisitions), the Reader
Import Module and the Server
Performance Pack. Their data was converted
from Inmagic DB/Textworks by IS staff.
Syngenta
Syngenta, formerly Zeneca Agrochemicals, are one of the global leaders in providing innovative solutions and brands to growers and the food and feed chain. The library, based at the Huddersfield site, purchased Heritage in March 2000.
Rita
Leatherbarrow was the librarian at that time. She first heard
about Heritage when she was searching the Internet for
library management systems to replace Dobis Libis, her existing
system.
“We looked on the Internet [for] what other systems were around. It had to be good value for money as we are not a large library but at the same time it had to meet our needs. A colleague of mine had heard it was an easy to use reliable system. We also had to consider getting our data out of Dobis Libis - our library’s data had to be extracted. [I.S. Oxford] offered a lot of help and support in doing this for us.”
Rita was quite clear about what she wanted from a replacement system:
“It had to be compatible with company IT systems. [We also needed] to convert our data from the existing system into formats required by the Heritage system. [We wanted a] user friendly, easy to use windows-based system. Best of all, [in Heritage] you can set up your library without any IT help other than them loading the software. You can set up Heritage to meet the demands of your own library”.
Rita arranged for an on-site demonstration from IS Oxford, and Emma Duffield guided her through the many features of Heritage and answered her specific questions. Rita was particularly pleased with the attitude of the sales staff at I.S.: “[They were] very helpful and understanding. They were as keen as we were to make sure what we needed was right for us and [we felt] under no pressure from them to buy.” Since purchasing the system she has found that this is the pervading attitude throughout the company: “They are very quick to offer support no matter how trivial the problem.”
Once Rita had decided that Heritage was the most likely system to meet their requirements she requested an evaluation copy of the software to trial. She worked with a colleague, using the demonstration library database and Heritage documentation to work through the system:
“I spent about 16 hours over a period of 4 weeks testing it. I found it to be very useful and easy to use. We had the manual to go with it and found it very straightforward, [with] no IT jargon to throw you into confusion”.
It was the simplicity and flexibility of Heritage that appealed to Rita:
“It can be set up to meet the needs of your Library. I am not an IT expert and found it so simple and enjoyable setting it up. We are a small Library and if we expand it has the capabilities and flexibility to be a much larger system at a sensible price.”
Rita went ahead and purchased Heritage. The next step
was to convert all the Dobis Libis 
data
into Heritage. This process was undertaken by the IS data
conversion team.
“The biggest problem was getting our data out of Dobis Libis which had data in it belonging to other parts of the company which where no longer part of our organisation (but they owned the Dobis system). We only had a few months [and IS staff] worked very closely with our IT staff and myself in ensuring the data we required was transferred. [IS Oxford] did the conversion, which they sent to me on a floppy to ensure it was correct. They were very helpful in supporting our needs and kept in regular contact with us to meet our requirements. Once satisfied the Heritage software was loaded and we only needed to use a paper system for a maximum of two weeks. During that time we spent one day at IS Oxford for training. Once we went live I had the overdue system and our temp paper system in Heritage and we were up and running. Now I could spend my time polishing and cleaning the system to meet our own needs.”
Since most of the stock had been catalogued on Dobis Libis, Rita did not have much additional cataloguing to undertake following the conversion. They did want to make changes to the classification system they used, however, and IS staff helped them undertake this changeover.
“We were using the UDC classification system and wanted to move to Dewey. Our book supplier provided the classification details for the majority of our books which had ISBNs and sent it as an Excel document, which was then sent to the Support Team who did the changeover. This was then sent back to us on a disk and it took all of a few minutes to load and convert our class numbers. The records without ISBNs were classified by our staff and only took about a week.”
Rita has advice for all new Heritage users that have booked training courses: “Before any training was given I read and worked through the evaluation manual, so for me the course at Oxford was easy. It meant I could ask lots of questions and not worry about this basic course.” She thinks that good documentation is very important, and that other users might also make use of it in addition to sending requests to the Heritage list server (known as Marvin):
“I feel if everyone who uses Heritage went through the manual at the evaluation stage we would not see such a large number of questions appearing through the Marvin group. It might help if people referred to the manuals more often. I would prefer a manual at the side of my desk and the final updates sent out once a year so you are not having to refer to the web pages – this could be some of the problem hence large number of questions put to Marvin.”
Rita
has since used Heritage to catalogue all her library stock,
whatever the media type. They have 45,000 items, which comprise
“books, CDs, videos, cassettes,
pamphlets, theses, translations, Internal Experimental Notebooks
and Internal Reports.” She says that Heritage has made a huge difference to her library:
“I was amazed at the many varieties of reports that you can create and this gave us all the help we needed to clean our data and get rid of all inconsistencies. The Dawsons import module was a bigger surprise than expected. We can have all our books catalogued in minutes - we now have keywords and the classification is [suggested] for most of the books.”
Syngenta run Heritage on Windows 2000 across a WAN. They currently have one additional full access licence and one additional OPAC licence, plus the Server Performance Pack and the Dawsons data import module. Their data was converted from Dobis Libis by IS staff.
Rita retired from Syngenta in May 2002 but is happy to speak to interested parties. Her home email address is thorscottage@tiscali.co.uk.
Siemens plc
The second of the featured libraries is the A & D Library & Information Service at Siemens plc in Manchester. Siemens Automation & Drives supplies customers in all industry sectors with totally integrated automation and electrical distribution systems. It is the world’s number one supplier of automation, process control and electrical distribution products.
Hilary
Jones, the Technical Librarian, purchased Heritage for
use in the A & D Library in 1999. In addition to the normal
cataloguing functions one would expect from a library management
system, Hilary was looking for a system that could keep a
record of the technical documents held by Siemens field engineers
and provide her with a way of distributing updates to each
engineer’s documents as they became available.
IS Oxford converted their existing library catalogue, held in Dataease, to Heritage. Their stock is comprised of books, technical manuals, videos, software, and equipment (PLCs, CPUs, memory modules, operator panels, power units etc.), all of which is catalogued on Heritage.
Hilary first became aware of Heritage at the Libtech exhibition at Olympia in 1999. She visited the show as part of her initial investigations into possible replacement library management systems. She had a very clear idea of her requirements:
“Something that would allow me to catalogue and maintain my diverse library stock. Also something that was adaptable to suit my needs, such as being able to change field titles (something most other systems I looked at did not do satisfactorily).”
She decided to look in detail at four systems, one of which was Heritage. She invited a sales representative to visit her in Manchester for an on-site demonstration. She was impressed with the system and arranged for her IT staff to speak to IS Oxford development staff to ensure that Heritage would operate within their existing IT infrastructure. She then spoke to IS staff regarding the customisation of Heritage that might be required. Happy both with the product and service provided, Hilary decided to purchase Heritage.
“I thought it was very user friendly, particularly for my users (I have self-circulation for the library), and it met all the requirements I had set out.”
The installation process went very smoothly and Hilary attended several bespoke training days to ensure that she was well-versed in both the basic functions and the way in which she could adapt Heritage to suit her own working practices:
“I chose to have a day in my library prior to installation (two months before going ‘live’), a day in Oxford immediately prior to installation to refine my test data (two weeks before going ‘live’), and a day in my library a little after the installation to sort out any queries and tackle reports. I have attended a couple of Heritage User Group sessions since.”
Hilary was operational very quickly. Since her training she has made use of the various support facilities provided by IS Oxford. These include the support helpline “their help has always been super”, the Heritage list server, Marvin, and the support website “I find it very good, particularly for the help sheets.” She is also very happy with the service she has received from IS staff: “I have spoken to people from each of the various departments and all have been most helpful.”
Hilary would recommend Heritage to any prospective customer:
“It has made the service much better. I would thoroughly recommend it as a user-friendly, and well supported system.”
“I hope it continues to be as good in the future.”
Siemens plc run Heritage on Windows
NT. They currently have one additional full access licence,
Heritage Online Server modules
and twenty additional OPAC licences. In addition to the core
software they use the Acquisitions
module. Their data was converted
from Dataease by IS staff.
For details of other special libraries that use Heritage please contact Emma Duffield, Sales Manager, on (01865) 481010 or email .