Planning a New System at the University of Malta Library

Planning is important when implementing a new system. The planning phase should be connected with the development of the system and with the library’s vision. If done properly planning would prevent time and effort from being wasted, better education and awareness of what is going on and better manipulation of the whole system. Improvements that should have been applied in the planning period where realized from lessons learnt at the end.

1.    Staff experienced a huge amount of pressure when starting to get used to the new application software. The setting up of new modules in the completely new system was a tough task. It would have been better to ask the supplier to provide more pre-configuration and not only advice and flexibility.

2.    A huge amount of time and effort were spent on data conversion. More time needed to be spent planning on what data needed to be converted or created again. It would have been easier to recreate some data rather than converting it to the new system. The Adlib data was very complicated and required a lot of work to convert it to Aleph.

3.    More training and education with real life examples before implementing the system would have helped the staff understand better the move from one system to another. Although staff and users saw the advantages of the new system they were also conscious about things that Aleph performed less well.

4.    ExLibris offered help and support over the internet. However it would have been much better if on-site support was available at the moment of actually starting using the system, and sometime before and after.

5.    The fact that there was a lot of time available led to a relaxed manner when working on the project. A lot of time was taken for granted and this resulted in a load of accumulated work in the last few weeks. It would have been better if the staff worked hard as if there was no time frame. This would have prevented a lot of hassle at the end.

6.    The library should have uploaded more notices and created awareness of the importance of attending workshops. More hands-on experience should have been given rather than only theoretical information.

Tender Process at the National Library of Malta

The National Library of Malta

“… to acquire, catalogue and preserve manuscripts, books, journals, periodicals and other online and electronic material issued in Malta…”

Tenders are open invitations to sell or buy a product, service or contract. These are generally published as legal notices in the Government Gazette as was the tender for The Implementation, testing and training of a Digital Assets Management Software System of the National Library of Malta (NLM.)

Tender document regarding management software system

 The open tender of the NLM required certain administrative tasks which are preparation, adjudication and implementation. In the preparation phase the proper tender period, advertising date, closing date, time and location are chosen. Studies such as on the available budget, human resources, type of software to be used are carried out. The written document must be in line with the public procurement regulations which regularly amended. 

The adjudication phase follows where a board is appointed to list and record tenders, apply selection criteria, evaluates and recommends the report.

The last stage is the implementation phase where evaluation of the tender is submitted and approved by the Department of Contracts (since amount of tender was more than €120,000.) Testing, evaluation, training of staff and deployment are also done.

 

How the system must work

Technical aspects include these six standards:

i.   Metadata: using a Dublin Core

ii.  Input : excel and xml files

iii. Export : required export facility to be used

iv. Output : what is shown on screen and printing options

v.  Reporting : what type of records have been exported or number of files created

vi. Audit trail : for accountability

       Presentation held by Mr Mamo (National Librarian & CEO) and Mrs Sciberras (Deputy Librarian, National Library)

Digitization at the Archdioses of Malta

Digitization is perhaps the post prevalent issue faced by contemporary archivists.  While transferring items to digital formats can result in enormous benefits for both users and institutions, it also creates several challenges.

The most important benefit is the increased access to archives at the researchers' disposal.  Researchers are given searching and browsing facilities that enable them to find required information with greater speed and accuracy.  In fact most researchers of the Archbishop's Curia's website are from France, UK, Malta, Australia, Bahrain and Spain.  The website has a high usage rate ad reached 167,000 hits.  An average of 12.38 minutes is spent by each user.  Pages of manuscripts can be clearly seen through a 600dpi PDF and can be downloaded for a fee of 50c per page. 

                                      Image taken from http://archives.maltadiocese.org/

The most difficult challenge is that the process is time-consuming and the creation and maintenance of digital libraries is very expensive.  When images are clear, scanning can be done automatically.  However when images are a bit blurred, the process has to be regulated manually.  Planning also takes a significant amount of time, eg. the planning phase at the Curia took 15 months while the project itself was carried out in 10 months. 

Money is needed for production, for material access and for preservation of digital information.  To make the situation more difficult, since the Curia is a non-profit organization, budget issues have to be handled very carefully.