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amother

White

Wed, Jan 17 2018, 12:39 pm

I have been approached by the administrator at my children's school to help them in establishing a library (I have an MLIS but haven't worked as a librarian since my children were born) The school forwarded me info on 3 systems that other schools are currently using, I'm not wowed by any of them:

TinyCat (Nicest to look at, love that it's all cloud based so no need to buy and download software, worry about z39.50 copy cataloging ability)

Handy Library Manager (Seems most appropriate but not the greatest visually)

ResourceMate (classic big company ILS, not impressed for the price, only one user unless you pay more, doesn't appear to be cloud based unless you pay extra for hosting)

What system is being used in your library? Ideally I would like Hebrew capabilities but it's not an immediate need based on the beginning collection we'd like to establish. Of course, cost is incredibly important. I won't need a data migration since we'll be starting fresh.

amother

Firebrick

Wed, Jan 17 2018, 7:22 pm

We're very low tech in our school, no computerizing yet.
If you do a follow up on how you plan to categorize I'd love to see that! Hatzlacha!

amother

White

Wed, Jan 17 2018, 7:40 pm

amother wrote:

We're very low tech in our school, no computerizing yet.
If you do a follow up on how you plan to categorize I'd love to see that! Hatzlacha!

Our beginning collection will only be non fiction to help students with their research papers so it will likely be on the Dewey system to mimic public libraries. If we decide to expand the collection to include sefarim I would like to do it based on the Elazar classification system. It’s similar to Dewey with the numbers 000-999 only for Jewish subjects (Dewey was anti Semitic, the call number range for Judaica is minimal)

Here I found a blog post that does a good job describing the different classification systems and breaks down the Elazar categories. The last library I ran had dual collections so all secular fiction and nonfiction were on Dewey and the sefarim books on Jewish history and EY were on Elazar

amother

Firebrick

Thu, Jan 18 2018, 8:07 am

amother wrote:

Yes, Dewey was a piece of work. I gather this is more of an academic library than a school library. I didn't see the link but I'm curious. We use the Weine system which is based on Dewey and really inadequate, but it's ok since we're really a typical BY library.

amother

White

Thu, Jan 18 2018, 11:04 am

So sorry, here is the link I found!

https://bnaiisrael.wordpress.c.....rary/

If you are interested in creating an online catalog, check out TinyCat. You can quickly catalog all your item through LibraryThing and then TinyCat has a beautiful OPAC that you can show your students how to use. It's a small monthly cost based on how many catalogued items you have. I'm tempted to start with this since it's so cheap but I'm not sure it would allow for future data migration to a more advanced system.

amother

Firebrick

Thu, Jan 18 2018, 7:58 pm

amother wrote:

Thanks. The boys division is computerized so we'll probably do whatever they do. I was curious which system you were going to use - Weine, Elazar, if not academic color coding or whatever. I think if we were starting from scratch I'd go with Elazar but we can make Weine work for us. It really wouldn't be practical to redo.

amother

White

Thu, Jan 18 2018, 8:09 pm

Do you by any chance know what computer system the boys division is using to manage the collection?

Thanks!

amother

Firebrick

Thu, Jan 18 2018, 8:13 pm

amother wrote:

Do you by any chance know what computer system the boys division is using to manage the collection?

Thanks!

Sorry, no.

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