Lum Library offers full text searching
The Appraisal Institute is a global membership association of professional real estate appraisers, with 22,000 members and 92 chapters throughout the world. Founded in 1932, its mission is to support and advance its members as the choice for real estate solutions and uphold professional credentials, standards of professional practice and ethics consistent with the public good. Members of the Appraisal Institute benefit from a wide array of professional education and advocacy programs, and many hold the prestigious MAI, SRPA and SRA designations.
The Appraisal Institute, based in Chicago, IL, has used Liberty since 2008, moving from their previous system, SirsiDynix Horizon. At the time, the Appraisal Institute’s vendor was discontinuing the incumbent Horizon system, presenting Eric Goodman, the Senior Manager of the Lum Library, with a significant problem. The Lum Library had just embarked on a huge project with their legacy system, and had no way of realizing their project goals.
“The actual demonstration was without any doubt superior to the others. Liberty had the easiest user interface with the OPAC and data entry was very smooth. That was a highlight.”
A replacement project was started. It was important to meet the current needs for information management and provide a more elegant solution than already existed, but also to partner with a provider who could move with the Institute’s future direction and plans. One of the main things Eric was looking for in a new ILS was to provide as much information online as possible to enable members to search remotely. What Eric noticed in the demonstration stages of his evaluation of replacement systems, was that Liberty’s OPAC would give the members a more intuitive means of searching and the screen could be tailored to fit the Institute’s particular needs.
Eric identified the requirement to assign rights and access privileges in quite specific ways so that particular groups of users could access only the records that they had rights to see. There were five distinct groups of users; from the public through to Board Members. Liberty’s Security and Rights Management functionality, along with a Softlink developed script used to set values programmatically in the users’ records, satisfied this exact requirement.
Prior to Liberty, the Appraisal Institute had been using two separate databases in order to offer their members full access to materials and to full text searching of all internally published articles. What Softlink was able to do with the Institute’s database was merge documents from two data sources and link them directly to the Liberty catalog records, resulting in full text indexing of all linked articles and an integrated environment for members.
Opting for the SaaS implementation of Liberty meant the Institute was able to retire its 8 year old server, replacing it with an external platform. This provides sufficient disk storage to accommodate the Library’s electronic holdings, for the present and into the future, with no more complicated “workarounds” to manage the indexing and linking of PDFs. In Liberty, this is native functionality.
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