Warwickshire County Council Libraries
Warwickshire County, situated in the heart of the United Kingdom, offers its residents library and information services through 34 libraries and 5 mobile libraries. The libraries are an important community resource, furthering the County's mission to create “opportunity for all through information, advice, guidance, learning and inspiration."
A long-time Infor customer, Warwickshire County Libraries chose the Vubis Smart integrated library system to improve library management workflows and to offer users enhanced online services. The Vubis Smart implementation includes a 250 staff license and incorporates circulation, cataloguing, acquisitions, serials, and reporting modules. Through a dynamic Web OPAC, users enjoy access to the County's diverse collections. Particularly noteworthy are the County's music and drama collections of playsets and vocalsets, which users can access through a guided search (‘search trees') in the Web OPAC. Another interesting implementation, to be completed by the end of 2008, is “Warwickshire Working Lives” - an oral history project that uses a modified MARC21 format. More information about this project may be found at http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/workinglives.
In addition to Vubis Smart, the County will also be implementing
AquaBrowser by Medialab. AquaBrowser will interface seamlessly with the
Vubis Smart Web OPAC to provide users a visual faceted search
experience.
Commenting on the Vubis Smart implementation, Warwickshire County Council's head of libraries, learning and culture, Edwina Cordwell, said: "Online services are playing a greater and greater role in our everyday lives so we envisage providing virtual library resources and enabling more to be done over the web, such as payments. Libraries play a major role in each and every community and Vubis Smart will allow us to expand that role."
Muriel Walton, Senior Library Assistant, Stratford upon Avon Library, said: "It is a very user-friendly system giving staff access to a much wider variety of information, enabling us to give a better service to customers. For example, we can now transfer requested items from one library to where they are needed much more quickly."
Visit the Warwickshire County Council Libraries Web OPAC at: http://library.warwickshire.gov.uk/
