Yet another ILS?

Why and how

Igor Milhit & Nicolas Prongué

RERO, Switzerland

ELAG 2019, Berlin

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

1 framework

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

 

 

4. All this very user-friendly

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.

EASY

HEM...

Data model

MI

WMI

WEMI

MARC21

BIBFRAME

IN HOUSE

RDA

(W)MI

Probably a mix of in-house and Bibframe

dIVERSE USER'S NEEDS

network

large and
independent

small and
independent

public

heritage

school

special

Consortium

location / library / organization

Ever evolving tools

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

Timeline

Take-home message

  • Keeping and developing competencies locally
  • Staying independent from big commercial providers
  • Being able to satisfy specific requirements
  • Offering transparency

Thank you!

Test our demos

Follow or contact us

Github

rero21.ch

Twitter

Gitter

Taiga

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