Weeping and screaming

A summary of the article "Building a collection development CMS on a shoestring budget," by Regina Beach and Miqueas Dial, published in Library Hi Tech, vol. 24, no. 1, 2006.

The authors work at Texas A&M in Kingsville (TAMUK)-- a satellite of the central campus in San Antonio. The Southern Association of Colleges found deficiencies in the library system, especially regarding the availability of appropriately challenging resources. Both faculty and students felt that the curriculum was necessarily "dumbed down" as a result of the inadequate resources provided by the library.

It was decided that a Content Management System (CMS) could be implemented to help faculty and other appropriate TAMUK employees order resources more efficiently. Beach and Dial envisioned the CMS also being integrated with distance-learning instructional software, such as Blackboard, and eventually allowing instructors to use online textbooks for class.

A significant portion of the article was devoted to explaining how the CMS would improve efficiency in the technical services department of the library by reducing the number of times bibliographic data would need to be entered-- to one. This would be entered by the requester. At the time the article was written, the authors used Microsoft Access to create a relational database with resource information and user interface to order the resources. They were also concerned with compatibility; for example, they had initially wanted to use the ISBN as a unique identifier, but Baker & Taylor do not print ISBNs on their invoices.

The most significant portion of the article to me came when the authors implemented their plan and "the primary author took order cards away from the acquisitions production environment. There was literally weeping and screaming." One take away here is, as the authors point out, change is sometimes a slow and painful process. The other take away is, how much collaboration was there in this plan? How much input did the acquisitions people have? Could this plan have been implemented differently so that most people were walking with them, as opposed to digging in their heels?