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Heritage Theological Case Study

THUG’s close ties to IS Oxford have benefited the members by ensuring that their particular concerns are addressed in the ongoing development of Heritage software. Regular contact with group members and detailed feedback from meetings has enabled us to target improvements to areas of Heritage that will improve the day to day operation of theological libraries.

Spurgeon’s College, London

The first of the featured libraries in this section is Spurgeon's College. Founded by Charles Haddon Spurgeon in 1856, the College is an evangelical seminary, in membership with the Baptist Union of Great Britain, committed to preparing men and women for the Church’s mission and ministry in the contemporary world. The aim of the college is ‘to seek to blend evangelical faith with contemporary relevance, and academic excellence with spiritual growth’. Spurgeon’s may have started with just one student back in 1856, but today provides religious instruction for over 400 students, catering both for on-site and distance learners.

The library at Spurgeon's College is managed by Judy Powles and contains approximately 50,000 volumes, 90 periodical titles and a number of videos, cassettes, CD-ROMs and multi-media packages. The library catalogue has been computerised since 1990 and is now available to users via the Internet.

Initially Judy managed the library using the BookshelF system, but decided in 1994 that she needed to upgrade to a new library management system. Judy had very clear ideas of what she was looking for when replacing BookshelF. Her aim was to make her library catalogue and stock as accessible as possible to her users, so she was particularly concerned that a replacement system would be “robust enough to cope with self-issuing on a 24 hour basis” and “very flexible, including an option for easy ‘publishing’ on the Internet”. There were undoubtedly a number of products on the market that would address these requirements, but her budget meant that value for money would be a determining factor. “As a charity with very limited funding, some of the large systems were far too expensive for us even to look at”.

Judy’s experience with using BookshelF led her towards Heritage. BookshelF was originally written by a IS Oxford* before being licensed to a Midlands company who sold the product successfully for a number of years. Therefore, BookshelF and Heritage had essentially been written by the same people. “Heritage was the natural choice as it was so similar to what we already had. IS Oxford offered a data conversion service which was already geared up for libraries changing from BookshelF so it seemed the obvious option”.

Functionality, however, was an important consideration, and any new system had to be sophisticated enough to meet Judy’s requirements. Heritage, although written by the same team responsible for BookshelF, offered far superior management facilities. “Heritage was the most flexible for our purposes, in particular the need to have 24 hour availability. The cost aspect was also important and Heritage seemed good value for money, in comparison with similar software packages”.

Judy went on to use Heritage 3, the DOS version of Heritage, for five years. As with many other institutions, the approach of 2000 necessitated a major review of the IT infrastructure in the college. Judy then had to decide whether to upgrade Heritage or look for an alternative system: “While we were upgrading the hardware, it seemed sensible to upgrade the software as well, especially as we were keen to make our catalogue available on the Web”.

Maintaining close relationships with customers has always been highly important to staff at IS Oxford and this was a significant consideration for Judy: “When we changed from Heritage 3 to IV, we didn't even contemplate changing supplier!” .

The upgrade from Heritage 3 to Heritage was considered a standard upgrade by IS Oxford and was therefore provided to customers as part of the support service with only a small charge for the move to a new windows database.

The upgrade process was, according to Judy, “very simple and well documented” but she does have some advice for any librarian changing from one system to another:

“Prior to implementation I had a training session in Oxford. Unfortunately by the time we actually converted, I have to say that I had forgotten much of what I had been told in the session and I had to attempt to use the manual (not very successfully). This meant that I had to make a number of phone calls and send lots of email messages to IS Oxford. In retrospect it would have been better to have had the training session nearer the conversion date. However this may not have been possible because so many libraries were converting from Heritage 3 to IV at that time and training days were in great demand.”

Judy has been a Heritage user for many years now and therefore doesn’t use the telephone support service as much as she used to (and when the need arises she normally uses email on all but urgent occasions). She has, however, made use of the Heritage Support website: “On occasion an email to Support has resulted in being referred to various helpsheets on the website. These are extremely useful”.

Maintaining links with other Heritage users also provides valuable support. Early on, the User Group was the main forum, but now Marvin, the Heritage list server, provides her with a very convenient way of keeping abreast of developments and interacting with other librarians using Heritage: “I find [Marvin] extremely useful. The replies from other Heritage users and also from Support are helpful. I tend to ‘file’ replies which I think may turn out to be useful in the future”.

IS Oxford staff work hard to build and maintain strong relationships with customers. Spurgeon’s College is a typical example of a library that purchased Heritage many years ago and has continued to upgrade the system as new releases are made available. IS Oxford’s aim is that customers never feel the need to purchase another system – they have a team of developers working constantly on extending and improving the system with existing users in mind. They are very proud of the fact that they have retained over 90% of the customers that have ever bought Heritage; many of those they have lost have had to leave reluctantly as their institutions have merged with others using different products or their internal IT policies have changed.

Eight years on, Judy is still confident that she made the right decision when she chose Heritage:

“I have always been very pleased with Heritage and the service provided by the staff at IS Oxford. It is a very robust system and the problems are few and far between. If it can be left to its own devices for 24 hours a day throughout the year, including Christmas Day, and can survive our students, then it must be good!”

“Keep up the good work!”

Spurgeon’s College run Heritage on Windows 2003 with five additional full access user licences, four OPAC only user licences, Heritage Online, Acquisitions and Fines modules. Their data was converted from Bookshelf by IS staff.Their catalogue can be accessed via the college website: http://www.spurgeons.ac.uk.

The Islamic Foundation

The second of the featured libraries is that of the Islamic Foundation in Markfield, Leicestershire. Established in 1973, the aim of the foundation is to bring about a better understanding of Islam in the West. The Institute at Markham offers education, training, publications and research ‘representing the Islamic response to the intellectual challenge of our times’.

The Islamic Foundation purchased Heritage in 1998, and use the Serials Management Module in addition to the core Heritage software. IS Oxford converted their existing library catalogue, held in UNESCO (a United Nations system) to Heritage. Their stock is comprised of books, journals and newspapers - which are catalogued on Heritage - and slides and audio-cassettes, which they have yet to catalogue.

The library staff at the Foundation first encountered Heritage at the Library Resources Exhibition** at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. They were primarily looking for an economical, user-friendly system which would enable them to offer an online catalogue to their users. The Institute was also very keen that they purchase a system from a UK company.

The exhibition provided an excellent opportunity to look at all the systems on the market, and the library staff selected three systems to look at in more detail, one of which was Heritage. The library staff then worked very closely with the Institute’s computer manager throughout the procurement - his opinion was key when making the final decision, and he undertook the installation of the hardware and software in the library.

Jasmine Ansari, one of the library staff, says that she has found I.S. staff to be “friendly and communicative” and the support staff in particular are “very helpful and they respond quickly to my problems”. She also uses the Heritage list server, Marvin, to communicate with other Heritage regarding various issues, not all related directly to the software.

One of the benefits of Heritage for the Institute, says Jasmine, is that “our collections are multi-lingual and with Heritage our users can search in Arabic as well as English”. She says that this is an “extremely useful facility, especially for our researchers”. This is one of the major benefits of Heritage for multi-lingual libraries – the system recognises many different character sets and formats, including non-Roman character sets and other European languages that require different characters.

Jasmine is happy to talk to prospective users about Heritage: “I feel at this stage I am still learning about Heritage. However, anyone wishing to visit our Library is most welcome”.

The Islamic Foundation run Heritage on Windows 2000 with two additional full access user licences, three OPAC only user licences and the Serials Management module. Their data was converted from UNESCO by IS staff.

Oak Hill College, London

The third and final featured library is that at Oak Hill College, a theological college in North London housing one of the finest theological libraries in southern England. The college provides biblical training for contemporary ministry in the Church of England and other spheres of Christian service.

The library at Oak Hill has been managed since 1988 by Wendy Bell. She was appointed as the first professional librarian and charged with bringing the library up to date. This naturally involved computerisation. The library at the time held around 18,000 items, but has grown by another ten thousand items in recent years – Wendy estimates that they add, on average, around half a metre of books to the shelves each week!

Wendy had to wait for a few years before eventually computerising, as there were no systems appropriate for libraries such as hers on the market at that time. In 1993 she started to look around again:

“I spent time visiting other libraries, talking to librarians, attending conferences and demonstrations and also having companies display their products in my library. I first came across Heritage (version 3 in those days) at the Library Resources Exhibition at the NEC** and was very impressed with its versatility, adaptability and cost. I contacted other theological colleges that used Heritage and received favourable reports – all the people I spoke to said how eager IS Oxford* were to fit the system around the needs of the customer and how quick they were to respond to any questions and problems that might arise – and I was also impressed by the Christian ethos of the company.

“I was under some pressure from the college managers to use the library software from the firm that provided the management software. This sounded attractive because of the promise of uniformity but in practice the system proved inadequate in many ways and would have been frustrating to use because of its limitations. I also considered a home-made system used by one of the other theological colleges which was very tempting, but I was worried that if the designer were to ever move away from the college there would be no support or development.

“So I recommended Heritage 3 to the College, first to the academic staff (some of whom had attended a demonstration) and then to the College Trust, who would ultimately be responsible for funding the project. They were initially concerned that IS Oxford didn't provide the hardware, but a solution was found by the bursar purchasing this in addition to his accounting hardware and establishing a maintenance contract. So my proposal was accepted without much dispute.

“The computers arrived on June 14th 1994. We had a few problems getting the software to run over the network but IS Oxford were very helpful and the problems were ironed out. A temporary member of staff was employed and we both found that the software was very easy to use. The training day in Oxford consolidated our knowledge although it was unnecessary as the manual and Support answered all our queries”.

Wendy has been instrumental in organising a Theological Heritage User Group CD-ROM of catalogue data to assist with retrospective cataloguing for theological libraries. This catalogue is compiled from the combined data of a number of libraries in the group and can therefore be used to speed up the retrospective cataloguing process for new Heritage theological users, as much of the stock will be common to other theological libraries.

Wendy eventually completed the task. “It took two of us working part-time nine months to catalogue what was now 22,000 items. Circulation was tested over the summer of 1995 and went live in September with very few problems. Most people reacted favourably and were enthusiastic”.

Wendy has since upgraded from the DOS version to the Windows version of Heritage:

“The main advantages of using Heritage over the previous manual system were the subject/keyword access to the collection and the tightening up of loan procedures. We set up the system with two OPACs showing both enquiry and circulation and it was easy for the users to swap between the two. I haven't used the map facility but it is an attractive feature. The move to Heritage was smooth and further enhanced the system. I was able to change the backdrop to a picture of our new academic centre which was in the process of being built, and the interface was very popular and familiar to users.

Heritage Technical Support continue to respond quickly and helpfully to all enquiries. I subscribe to Marvin, but I must admit that most of the time it is an irritation. However, I will continue to subscribe because of the odd gem that comes through - the ideas it plants of possibilities that I hadn't even considered.”

Wendy has plans to further enhance the services her library offers in the near future:

“I am shortly to purchase Heritage Online and the fines module, but find that the manual serials records are adequate for the time being. I have never regretted the decision to choose Heritage, and this has been further enhanced by the setting up of the Theological Heritage User Group, which IS have fully supported.

I would willingly speak to prospective users.”

Oak Hill College run Heritage on Windows NT with three additional full access user licences, eight OPAC only user licences and the Acquisitions module.

For details of other theological libraries that use Heritage please contact Emma Duffield, Sales Manager, on (01865) 481010 or .

*IS Oxford has previously been registered under the names Logical Choice and Inheritance Systems Ltd.
**Now the Library + Information Show held at Excel in London