1. Some context

What is RERO?

Réseau romand

Library network of Western Switzerland

• 34 years old
• 200 libraries
  • scientific
  • public
  • heritage
• 6.5 mio bibliographic records
• 19 people at the central office

RERO provides products...

an ILS
(Virtua)

a discovery tool

a digital library

an ILL software
made at RERO

...and a few other
tailor-made software solutions

...and services

• professional coordination
• custom-made developments
• training and support
• data processing
• hosting of library services
• IT-centre: monitoring, security, backups

Disruption

2014

an important library group announces his retirement from RERO

2015

project "Swiss Library Service Platform" is launched

IMPACT

• division between academic and other libraries
• unsustainability of RERO
• reduction of existing collaborations between libraries
• loss of competencies in French-speaking Switzerland

Reinvention of RERO

Competence and service center for libraries

• non-profit foundation
• with a new in-house, open source ILS
• open to the whole Switzerland
• targeted at school, public and heritage libraries

2. rero ils & Invenio

• open source ILS
• web app, SaaS
• hosted in our private cloud
• multitenant

Multiple Services

• RERO ILS
• MEF
• SONAR (sonar.ch)

• doc.rero.ch for +15 years
• by CERN
• modular

3. KEY ACHIEVEMENTS

circulation

• invenio-circulation

• rero_ils
  • configuration
  • API
• Angular UI

circulation

• circulation policies
  • item type
  • patron type
• libraries opening hours and calendar

Circulation UI

MEF

Multilingual Entity File

Some (few) requirements:

1. Search and display multilingual authorities

2. Reuse as much as possible international reference files (GND, BNF, ...)

3. Edit multilingual authorities

How MEF works

• Accessible through an API.
• Libraries can independently choose to which authority file they wish to contribute.
• Cataloguing is done directly in the source reference file, MEF is only an aggregate.
• Multilingual cataloguing is possible only in Wikidata.
• All benefit from multilingual search and display.

Current state (may 2019)

Proof of concept

• Only one entity: "person"
• Three reference files: RERO, GND, BNF
• Discussions with Wikimedia for a close integration of Wikidata
• Call for comments until June 2: tinyurl.com/y2ph4ss9

Demo API:

mef.test.rero.ch

4. Challenges

Multilingualism

• for the ILS interface
• for bibliographic data
  • index & search
  • display, facets, etc.

Data model

MI

WMI

WEMI

MARC21

BIBFRAME

IN HOUSE

RDA

dIVERSE USER'S NEEDS

network

large and
independent

small and
independent

public

heritage

school

special

Consortium

Ever evolving tools

• Python modules
• Dependencies
• Helpers (pipenv, isort, …)
• AngularJS, Angular
• Bootstrap 3 → 4
• …

Timeline