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.

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
• Summon Discovery Service
• VDX Interlibrary Loan
• 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

The current version of Voyager is 8.1.1.

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 are 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.

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 for short periods which do not necessitate activating Disaster Recovery
• 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
• Provides for business continuity with a high availability Disaster Recovery solution. The main production site is housed in Auckland (Datacom Albany Datacentre) and the test, DR and COPAC environments all installed on Wellington based servers (Datacom Abel Smith Street Datacentre)
• 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.

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.

Summon Discovery Service

Serials Solution Summon was implemented at VUW, AUT, Waikato and Otago Universities in 2011. Summon provides users with a single search and discovery tool to access the information resources provided by these LCoNZ member institutions. See http://www.serialssolutions.com/summon for further information on Summon.

VDX Interlibrary Loan

VDX by OCLC is an electronic interlibrary loan and document request management system. It allows endusers to place and manage borrowing and lending requests between libraries without intervention by library staff. LCoNZ VDX has been put into operation at AUT, Waikato, Otago and Canterbury universities.

See http://www.oclc.org/uk/en/vdx/overview/default.htm for further information on VDX.

Institutional Research

LCoNZ has developed multi institutional research repositories for AUT, Waikato and Otago Universities and Unitec using DSpace and hosted by Waikato University Information Technology Services.

Work continues on the development of the repositories and in 2012 we upgraded to DSpace 1.8.2.

Andrea Schweer, LCoNZ IRR Technical Specialist has been accepted as a DSpace Committer. 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 always 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).

AUT have completed integration of the institutional repository with the university's research management application.