LCoNZ has developed a partnership with ExLibris and Datacom Systems Ltd to provide an integrated library management system, hosted externally.

LCoNZ also offers a full business solution, including hosting and ongoing operational support services.

LCoNZ can also provide:

• Access and management of licensed electronic resources.
• Federated searching and deep linking at the digital content level.
• Support for storage, management and access to locally created digital objects.

If you wish to wish to subscribe to any of the products mentioned, please contact the LCoNZ office

• Integrated Library Management System.
• Borrow Direct
• Hosting by Datacom Systems Ltd.
• Txt Messaging
• Link Resolver and Federated Search solutions.
• Institutional Research Repository.
  

Integrated Library Management System

LCoNZ offers Voyager, an integrated library management system designed specifically for academic and research institutions. Voyager is a product of ExLibris, which merged with Endeavor in 2006.  For further details regarding Voyager see: http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/voyager.htm

LCoNZ upgrade to Voyager 7.0.4 in July 2009

Borrow Direct

LCoNZ Borrow Direct service was launched in January 2007. This service allows staff and students at any of the LCoNZ universities to access all four of the library catalogues directly through their own library catalogue, identify items and initiate a loan from any of the other three libraries. There is no need for intervention or action from library staff to activate loans. Items are delivered to the library location staff or students designate. Staff and students can borrow unique items from other LCoNZ libraries as well as taking the pressure off local holdings.

The benefits of borrowing direct are especially strong for students studying at a distance, who will be able to access and retrieve resources from a location that may be more convenient than their home institution.

This service has been enthusiastically taken up by library users in all of the four LCoNZ universities. A student at AUT University who initiated a loan from Victoria University one afternoon shortly after the service commenced, was amazed to find the book ready for collection at the AUT University library the following morning.

The Borrow Direct service has been reviewed and enhanced in 2009 and will continue to be evaluated and improved if required annually.

Hosting by Datacom Systems

The Datacom hosted solution provides:

• Access to a high availability system, contractually specified to meet 99.5% availability on a 24 by 7 basis.
• Load Balancing and Redundancy: Multiple webservers and multiple application servers are utilised to provide both load sharing (balancing) and server redundancy. This ensures that the failure of one server does not impact on the systems availability, and that other servers can be added easily as system usage grows. 
• Continuous OPAC: This enables the OPAC to continue operating when the main database is unavailable, which is useful during database upgrades and during extended system outages.
• Web Response Monitors: The web response monitors are systems installed at each institution and at Datacom, which periodically test the responsiveness and functionality of the OPAC. This enables us to provide timely alerting of network or system problems and also to produce a graphical representation of the OPACs performance over time.
• LCoNZ funded Datacom to ExLibris 500 level certification, which allows Datacom to conduct system upgrades in local time, lowering the cost of software upgrades.
• Provision of a separate test server and disk environment, which is large enough for each LCoNZ site to maintain a copy of their production database.

Txt Messaging

Research shows that on average e-mail is opened within 24 hours and replied to within 48 hours, while txt messages are read within 15 minutes and responded to within 60 minutes.   811 out of every 1000 New Zealanders own a mobile phone.   Two-thirds of these owners are active users of txt messaging. We have the opportunity to communicate and engage with a majority of our patrons in a medium that is well accepted and used by them.

Txt messaging of notices from the Voyager Library Management System has been implemented.   Datacom provide the support to send txt messages to patrons from Voyager.   Users have to opt in to the service which has shown steady growth over the last year.

Link Resolver and Federated Search solutions

LCoNZ is able to provide access to link resolving and federated search products through its contract with Serials Solutions. For further details see the following:

• 360: http://www.serialssolutions.com/ss_360_link.html  
• 360 Search:  http://www.serialssolutions.com/ss_360_search.html

Serials Solutions federated search product 360 Search has been implemented at all LCoNZ universities where it is known as Multisearch.   
Multisearch enables users to:

• search multiple databases with one click
• refine results using Vivisimo clustering
• click straight through to full text, or identify full text using articlelinker
• save and email results or export to reference management software

AUT the first to implement say “The performance of multisearch is outstanding, with the service able to cope with any load we throw at it, both in terms of number of simultaneous users and number of databases searched.”

Institutional Research

LCoNZ has developed multi institutional research repository using DSpace hosted by Waikato University Information Technology Services. Contact LCoNZ for further details.

In 2009 the repositories at AUT, Waikato and Otago are developing rapidly.   Kim Shepherd, LCoNZ IRR Technical Specialist, has prepared a Statistics package for the LCoNZ Institutional Research Repositories.   All sites are extremely happy with the package, which removes one of the major gaps in DSpace.
Kim has been invited to join the DSpace Committers Group and is one of the 12 committers worldwide.  Committers have access to accept and commit patches into core DSpace and also vote on the future direction that DSpace will take so it is particularly advantageous for LCoNZ.

We have also identified that one of the major issues with our repositories is that researchers and academic staff do not have an appropriate level of understanding regarding the different versions of their research outputs.  We have therefore produced a Versions Toolkit for use with the repositories (based on the UK TOOLKIT that the London School of Economics and Political Science prepared for JISC).

Integration with the universities’ research management applications is our next project associated with the repositories.