UNICAL - UNIversity of Calabria Automated Library

Institution name: Library contact person: Automation contact person: Aleph configuration:

The University

The University of Calabria, situated in Southern Italy, was created in 1972. Its peculiar architecture is due to the co-operation between the Italian Gregotti and the Danish Martensson architects. The University of Calabria is the only example of a residential university campus in Italy, and about forty percent of student population lives on campus. The university campus is set in parkland, close to the village of Arcavacata, four kilometres from the historical center of Rende and ten from the town of Cosenza.

Now the University has more than 12,000 students, 500 teaching and research staff, 700 technical and administrative staff, an annual budget of 35 millions of ECU, land, buildings and equipment worth more than 350 millions of ECU.

The University is organised in 20 Departments that are commonly engaged in research and teaching activities with other international Institutions.

The Automation

The University started the library automation programme in 1990. We evaluated many software for library automation and then we adopted ALEPH, because of its flexibility and novelties in the OPAC module.

The University of Calabria Library Automation structure reflects its Departmental organisation with departmental libraries, two Inter-departmental libraries that serve the Faculties of Economics and Letters and Arts. There is also a Central Library of general readings.

Actually, the two Inter-departmental libraries, the Central Library, and almost all the departmental libraries are networked in the Automated University Library System through the campus Optical Fibre Network FDDI and Ethernet LAN.

Most of the libraries use all Aleph functions:
CATALOGING, SERIAL, MAINTENANCE, CIRCULATION, ACQUISITION, IUTIL

Major Developments Planned:

The first aim for the next year is to network the remaining Departmental libraries to the University of Calabria Automated Library System.

The third aim is to integrate the databases on CD-ROM in the University Library Automated System. In this way the users will be able to consult them at any time from every entry point on/off the campus network (async terminals, PC networked, work-station UNIX).

The fourth aim is to implement the server ALEPH/WWW to permit graphic interface Client ALEPH/GUI.

Finally, the Aleph version 3.2.4 runs on a dedicated VAX 6330. However the idea is to move, within one year, on a UNIX system machine.

Open Problems:

Actually, the database consists of about 100.000 records and each year increases with 15.000 new records regarding new acquisitions. However, there is a plan to insert during 1996 100.000 new records the existing holdings of the departmental libraries. These work wil be done by young catalogers tha were trained last year.

To accelerate the construction of the database, when we started the library automation, we decided to buy some database on CD-ROM to download existing titles in our database. At the moment, the CD-ROM's Collection consists of more than 36 CD-ROM's regarding also several scientific areas as biology, chemical, fisic, economy, sociology, law, etc...

In the past years we have used some foreign catalographic CD-ROM's(Bibliofile, British Library, BNB-British National Bibliography) for indirect cataloguing of foreign books and serials. This year we are implementing the records export from BNI-Bibliografia Nazionale Italiana in UNIMARC format, the conversion in ASCII format and then the importation in ALEPH (Util 90 e 91).

The result of the experience was very positive. The record importation from BNI help us to encrease our database very quickly for italian books, not easy to find on foreign databases. However, after four year of using ALEPH, we have to say that there is no way to import external records (Marc and Unimarc) using Windows in ALEPH's edit mode. The implementation of these new features in Aleph could help us in building more quickly a larger database.

Another open problem is the inventory util. The actual inventory util is not useful at all for us. Aleph was conceived to be used by a territorial distributed library system. However, this idea is not implemented at the inventory level. Libraries that belong to same institution but have separated budgets cannot use the inventory util, that assume a sequential and unique counter. We are still wating for the solution of this problem.

In our University there is a large disappoiment about this unsolved problem.

Conclusions

Our experience as ALEPH users' is largerly positive. However there are the above mentioned problems and other little improvements could help us in exploiting ALEPH's full potentialities.

Maria Aceto (Aleph Library Manager), 18 July 1995
Giovanni Passarelli (CD-ROM and network manager)

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