Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) - Unidad de Coordinacion de Bibliotecas

• Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) - Unidad de Coordinacion de Bibliotecas (National Research Council - Libraries Coordination Unit)

• Ms. Agnes Ponsati Obiols, Director
• CSIC - Unidad de Coordinacion de Bibliotecas
• Jorge Manrique, 27, E-28006 Madrid, Espana
• tel: +34-91-585 5076; fax: +34-91-564 4202
• e-mail: Agnes@bib.csic.es

• Version: 3.2._4
• Functions: CCL, CI, MA, SER, ACQ, IUTIL
• Operating system: VMS 5.5 and 5.4
• Server type: VAX 9210 and VAX 8000; 2 MVAX 3300; 1 MVAX 3400

CSIC's Union Catalog: state of the art

The serials catalog is 100% automated while the monographs one is about 55%. These catalogs are defined as two local libraries under the same global. The 80 libraries working with Aleph are defined at the sublibrary level.

Since we have installed new Aleph version we have been working hard in training, manuals and screens translation and adaptations. On the way we have encountered many bugs and problems. Six months later we have had to move ALEPH in Madrid from Vax 6000 to Vax 9000, because performance of the new Aleph System was terrible.

But let's talk about the problems we found:
The most important problem was the management of our serials catalog. In the previous we had some data of the serials holding in a specific adaptation of book holdings (copies file). In the 3.2 the holdings information for serials has been converted to issue notes (i.e. issue files), in addition fictitious subscriptions have been created. The serials behaviours has changed a lot and we spent many time in discovering some tricks for recovering the control of the serial catalog. Anyway, we've lost many feature we used to have (as iutils for example).

About bugs, among many, the most important were:

• IL 909 Statistics to retrieve number of loans and holds per borrowers and sublibrary did not work.
• IUTIL 550 for print borrowers letters/claims in circulation did not print the name of the sublibrary any more. Crazy thing, when one wants to run this iutility each month having 40 sublibraries. We coulnd't identify to which library the borrower belonged.
• In Barcelona we wanted to define the catalan as a default language. Impossible to do it. Update profile was hardwired to two languages: English and Spanish.
• We could not retrieve statistical information for the serials catalog. Before 3.2 version, we used 901, but now we have to run one 108 per SBL and then sum all the log results, in order to have a simple information like "how many titles are in the serial catalog per SBL". We hope (as promised by EX-LIBRIS) that next version will have a iutil that will count number of titles per SBL.
• Table 04 for copying records from one local to another did not drop out files not present in the target local library.

  In November 1994, we've installed our first Aleph patch in all our 5 machines. But this only solved the problem of displaying holds when an item is returned in the 909 worked OK, the 550 printed letters as expected, and Catalan could be defined as a default language.

• New drivers for HP laser printers used as slaves.
• Modifications were made for the e-mail option print. Now e-mail are sent using EAN mail and not DEC mail. We use this option not only for print bibliographic queries but for interlibrary loan among the network.

New Plans for the Future

We are working also in developing a WWW server for the CSIC Libraries Network offering information of all kinds and also a Graphical User Interface for Aleph users. In fact WWW is now under construction.

A new feature that we are looking at, is the imaging because we are interested in digitalize some archive materials. It there are other Aleph users having experiences,this would be very wellcomed.