Tertiary institutes form common library system

By RICHARD WOOD

Four tertiary institutes have banded together to install a common library system at a cost of $5 million.

The Information and Resource Management System, officially launched last Thursday, may eventually provide the function for the libraries of all New Zealand tertiary institutes.

Auckland University of Technology, University of Waikato, Victoria University of Wellington and University of Otago formed a consortium called Conzulsys for the project.

Conzulsys chose Voyager software from US firm Endeavor Information Systems, hosted on a joint server at local IT services firm Datacom.

Victoria will go live at the end of the year, the rest began this month.

Each library's data remain separate at this stage, but searches of the collections of the four libraries will be able to be made from any one of them.



AUT technology services operations manager Russell Barron said Voyager was internet-capable and had an internal architecture that enabled true separation between web and database applications.

AUT university librarian Ainslie Dewe said there were definite savings compared with each institute doing its own system.

Advantages of operating as a consortium were in the sharing of the costs of implementation and developing "best practices".

Dewe said that in late 2001 the four institutes found they were all considering replacement systems.

She said there were already a number of approaches from other institutes and the next stage would be to establish a clearer governance structure.

The University of Auckland and the National Library already use the same software.