GobiWorks

A GobiWorks Profile





Cambridge, Massachusetts
May 2003

Contact:
Charlene Follett, Monograph Acquisitions and Gifts Librarian, Serials and Acquisitions Services (cfollett@mit.edu)
Christine Moulen, Library Systems Manager, Systems and Technology Services (orbitee@mit.edu)

 
 MIT Library
Library Organization:  The MIT Libraries include five major subject libraries (architecture and planning; engineering; humanities; science; management and social sciences) and several branch libraries in more specialized subject areas. The Libraries hold more than 2.6 million printed volumes, and extensive collections in other physical formats as well as licensed access to a growing number of electronic resources. Library collections are supported by the work of decentralized selectors and three centralized collections services departments that provide acquisitions, cataloging, and end processing for all subjects and formats. The Libraries' webpage can be viewed at http://libraries.mit.edu/.

ILS System:  Ex Libris Aleph Version 14.2.2 (soon to be 14.2.5)

Regular GOBI Users:  50-60

Services Profiled:
  • Approval Plan Shipping Records
  • GOBI Ordering
  • Electronic Order Confirmation Records
  • GobiSmart
  • GobiTween

The MIT Libraries have had a long-standing relationship with YBP and do a high volume of business with them (approximately 55% of our monographs budget for firm orders, plus an additional 15% for approvals.)

GOBI ordering has proven to be a time saver for ordering. We currently have two part-time order assistants and primarily use students to do our GOBI ordering since it's extremely easy to train them on GOBI.

Prior to going live on Aleph in July 2001, MIT was a GEAC Advance customer. We had implemented GOBI Electronic Order Confirmation Record (EOCR) loading with Advance, and it had worked quite well for us. Since we had experienced the efficiencies in ordering that GOBI provides, we wanted these efficiencies to continue with Aleph. Our six-month migration period was primarily spent on data conversion and testing and did not provide us with the luxury of time to change all of our acquisitions and cataloging workflows at the time of implementation.

 
 Many MIT staff worked on developing new workflows and GOBI/Aleph procedures, including Christine Moulen, Library Systems Manager; Garry Ziegler, Monograph Acquisitions Section Head; Bruce Goodchild, Monograph Acquisitions Receipts Assistant; and Charlene Follett, Monograph Acquisitions and Gifts Librarian.
Many MIT staff worked on developing new workflows and GOBI/Aleph procedures, including Christine Moulen, Library Systems Manager; Garry Ziegler, Monograph Acquisitions Section Head; Bruce Goodchild, Monograph Acquisitions Receipts Assistant; and Charlene Follett, Monograph Acquisitions and Gifts Librarian.

It took the combined efforts of staff from MIT, YBP and Ex Libris, working together over several months to make order record loading possible in Aleph. YBP and Ex Libris were both very interested in extending the same functionality to other customers, so they sought to develop solutions that could be used in the future, to avoid reinventing the wheel with each new customer. Much thought was put into such things as match points to be used in future developments, such as electronic invoicing.

GOBI has proven to be a useful tool for both our acquisitions and collections staff for the following reasons:
  • Ease of training/ordering - students key in an ISBN and notes on one screen
  • Immediate duplicate alert for other orders with YBP, including approvals
  • Book hunts, when a user requests a book that is still on order, are facilitated. We can quickly identify the status of an order on GOBI and if invoiced and shipped, quickly put our hands on the book in house and rush it along.
  • Continuous year-round ordering - we can continue GOBI ordering during our annual downtime for fiscal year closing and batch load the records once we go live again.
  • Collection management tool for selectors:
    1. Reporting capabilities - expenditure reports, transaction history reports, etc.
    2. GobiTween gives us a consortial view of purchases and collections decisions of fellow members of the Boston Library Consortium
We appreciate the flexibility of GOBI that comes via GobiSmart. YBP was easily able to re-customize GOBI screens for us via GobiSmart so that field names that had previously been set up for us to match GEAC Advance field names now match Aleph field names. GobiSmart customizations eliminate confusion in terminology as our students move back and forth between GOBI and Aleph. In addition, YBP was able to create validation lists for fixed data such as location codes, so that staff could not inadvertently assign an invalid one and thus cause a glitch when the file was loaded into Aleph.

 
 Much of MIT's ordering workflow depends upon student workers, including John Stewart.
Much of MIT's ordering workflow depends upon student workers, including John Stewart.
YBP orders are batched, as much as possible, by like fund/location and library note to take advantage of the Batch Order feature on GOBI, where defaults for these fields can be set for the whole batch. Then students need only key in the ISBN for each title and click "order"; the confirmation list displays and is printed out. For orders with different funds and/or library notes, we use Express ordering and record the confirmation number on each citation.

After the orders are placed on GOBI, YBP provides MIT with MARC-formatted EOCRs (Electronic Order Confirmation Records) for us to load daily into Aleph. This record loading, which provides the automatic creation of the bibliographic record, the order, the item, and the fund encumbrance has proven to be a real time saver for our acquisitions staff.

On the systems side, behind the scene each morning, a script automatically runs the following procedure:
  • FTP the file from YBP to our Aleph server
  • Make a few changes to the incoming MARC records, such as changing the record format to a local brief record type 'br'; mapping the five character YBP fund code into the full 15 character Aleph annual budget code; and calculating the net price using MIT's discount, which YBP does not do for EOCR records.
  • Check the catalog for duplicates against ISBN, ISSN, and title. This Aleph program was added or enhanced for MIT, and is generically useful for matching incoming MARC files against the catalog.
  • Load the records into Aleph. Records created include MARC bibliographic data, the order, budget encumbrance, item and holdings (the holdings creation is optional and not used by MIT.)
  • Email the logs from the duplicate check and load to acquisitions staff. Among information included in the logs are: any records that were matched, Aleph-assigned PO numbers for each order, budget errors (indicated by a dummy budget code assigned in the previous step), and any other errors.
MIT staff wrote the script that runs all of the above steps, including the ftp and e-mailing of the log files. It is scheduled via the standard UNIX cron. The duplicate check/matching routine is standard Aleph functionality, as well as the actual record loader. Aleph does have a daemon for scheduling these processes to run regularly; however, we did our own automation because of the extra steps we chose to add.

After Systems runs their behind-the-scenes activities detailed above, acquisitions staff review the reports for errors or duplicates that may need canceling and then retrieves the order records in Aleph for completion, which involves populating a few fields and activating the encumbrance. We have tried to make the process of completing GOBI order records in Aleph as automated as possible, with the help of Macro Express (http://macroexpress.com.)

 
 Order Assistants Whit Hill and Debbie Fazio review new approval books.
Order Assistants Whit Hill and Debbie Fazio review new approval books.

For approval books, we load YBP shipping records weekly, coinciding with our approval shipments. Like the daily EOCR loads, the shipping records automatically create bibliographic records, orders, item records, and fund encumbrances in Aleph.

Our workflow has been streamlined and benefited through the use of GOBI . Our workflows are a work-in-progress and we appreciate the willingness of YBP staff to collaborate with us to help us meet our changing needs. We look forward to using GOBI Edition 2 with its expanded functionality. Now that our Aleph implementation is complete and running smoothly, we are turning our attentions to further streamlining and are currently investigating full catalog record loading and shelf ready materials. YBP and MIT are also planning to test Ex Libris' recently released EDIFACT invoicing for monographs after we upgrade to a future version of Aleph.