Tuesday, November 21, 2000

SUNY's Library-Software Contract Includes 'Ultimate Protection': Program Code By FLORENCE OLSEN State University of New York officials have approved a five-year statewide contract for library software that is unusual because it requires the vendor to place in escrow a complete copy of the software source code and all related documentation. The escrow agreement is among many reasons that SUNY officials give for their optimism that a $19.5-million project called SUNYConnect will be successful. The five-year network project, spearheaded by the system's office of library and information services, will integrate the libraries of all 64 SUNY campuses by creating a shared virtual catalog of nearly 18 million records. The contract SUNY signed last month with the software vendor Ex Libris Inc. was not the first in which the university has insisted that a vendor using proprietary source code make escrow arrangements. "We've done it before, and it has benefited us," says Carey B. Hatch, assistant provost for library and information services at SUNY. "In case the vendor goes under, we still have access to the source code that makes the system work." At any time during the contract with Ex Libris, SUNY can look at the source code and documentation for the company's library-management system. If the contract is terminated for any reason, the source code and documentation will be released to SUNY. "That's our ultimate protection," Mr. Hatch says. Not all vendors are willing to sign escrow agreements, he adds. But library-software vendors that were unwilling to do so "were eliminated from consideration" when the university was accepting bids for the new contract. The ambitious SUNYConnect plan calls for interlibrary loans of nonelectronic books and other materials to be processed and delivered in 48 hours. By the time the library system is completed, officials also expect that nearly 50 percent of all serials and scholarly journals in SUNY's virtual library will be online and accessible from anywhere to SUNY students and faculty members, who can log in to the system from any Web browser. The 18 million records, which will be stored on large Oracle database servers, will represent all of the holdings in all SUNY libraries. "There's nothing that a faculty member at Harvard University or the University of Chicago or Stanford University has access to that our faculty or students won't have access to," says Peter D. Salins, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at SUNY. SUNYConnect will also provide better access to government data, Mr. Salins said. Most of the information is available electronically now, but Mr. Salins says it "is messy and incoherent." Under the new system, it will be organized and easy to download. A desire for greater operating efficiency also moved SUNY officials to create a statewide library-management system. "Because of rising serial-publications costs and the cost of technology, many libraries realize it's do or die," says Julie A. Wash, who is distance- and collaborative-learning librarian at Monroe Community College and also is president of the SUNY Librarians Association. SUNY's library directors are enthusiastic about the virtual-library project, Ms. Wash says. The library software will create a single electronic catalog and system for circulation, serials, acquisition, and administration for the universities' 71 libraries, while still permitting librarians to exercise their authority locally. SUNY is not the first state-university system to begin such a project. OhioLINK -- an electronic library and information network linking that state's university, college, technical, and community-college libraries and the State Library of Ohio -- served as a model for New York officials. California, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Virginia have similarly ambitious statewide library projects up and running. "If SUNY wants to stay up there with attracting students, we really need to do something like this," Ms. Wash says. Six SUNY campuses have begun installing the Ex Libris library software, known as ALEPH 500. They are Tompkins-Cortland Community College, the colleges at Fredonia and Oswego, and the university campuses at Binghamton, Buffalo, and Stony Brook. By 2004, all of the system's campuses expect to be using the software. The City University of New York has plans to follow SUNY in installing the Ex Libris software. Officials say "electronic bridges" will link SUNY's virtual library to CUNY's. SUNY officials say they would like to offer a fee-based service for nonuniversity users, such as researchers in the state's technology businesses and health-care organizations. "We're looking at ways to make this a resource, not just for our students and faculty but for the larger community in the state," Mr. Salins says. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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