CUFTS: Open-Source ERMS

Andy Perry and Bill DrewSUNY New Paltz

Tompkins Cortland Community College

What is it?

• Open source serials management• Alternative to commercial solutions• Electronic resource management• Public A-Z list of journals• Open url/DOI link resolving (GODOT)• Overlap reports• MARC record management and output

About CUFTS• Developed at Simon Fraser University (Canada).• Central instance hosting over 30 libraries at SFU• Many instances installed world-wide• Libraries can join the hosted central instance for a

reasonable fee or download and install the system locally for free as open source DIY.

• Designed to host multiple libraries as separate “sites”.• CUFTS is based on perl and PostgreSQL on linux. Ubuntu

is preferred over Red Hat.• I have no idea what the acronym stands for!

CUFTS Features• All the services driven by a knowledge base of e-resources

and titles belonging to those e-resources.• Knowledge Base now contains 464 resources and almost

586,000 title records, updated monthly, and distributed by the central SFU instance.

• Each CUFTS library sharing an instance has its own “Local Resources”– Point to a global resource in the knowledge base– Can be unique to the library and not part of the knowledge base– Can include print resources

Different sites share one instance

CUFTS Local Resources

• Site Specific• Easy to “activate” resources from the Knowledge

Base.– Title lists maintained automatically as KB is updated

• Partial subscriptions like ScienceDirect are handled by activating specific titles or by batch load of issn’s to match the Knowledge Base

• Can include print subscription information• Can load title lists for resources not in the Global KB

Example of Partial Title Activation Load

issn10766332106214580001457509652302015599820959802203613682009457651742706100651281135964540252960209567151…

License Information Linked to “Local Resources”

Lots of Perl scripts“update_cjdb.pl” builds A-Z list“title_list_updater.pl updates KB if a new resource is added I haven’t tried all of them!

CJDB—CUFTS A-Z List

• Provides public access to e-journals• Derived from “local resources” in CUFTS• Highly customizable—template editor part of

CUFTS• Also features user accounts and user tagging• Indexing not real time—need to run

update_cjdb.pl script when adding a new resource

Very Basic Public A-Z List

Title display

SFU’sNicely Tricked outCustomizedA-Z list

E-Resource Comparison

cufts2marc

• Public version available at http://lib-cufts.lib.sfu.ca/CUFTS/cufts2marc-list.cgi • Outputs MARC or XML for titles in e-resource

aggregations• Options for mapping holdings data to 500-599 tag

(could be further manipulated to MARC holding tag)• Free option for adding bibliographic records for e-

resources for ILS or for adding level 2-3 holdings in OCLC

Cufts2marc Form: mapping e-journal holdings

Journal Authority—shows availability of specific title by aggregator

“Researcher”includes a suite of open source library systems

The Big Questions and Issues• CUFTS is a big system. It scales more effectively for a consortium

than for an individual library.– More libraries mean a better Knowledge Base– Learning/implementing all the functions and scripts

• How to make it fit with a partial implementation of Serials Solutions 360 Core and 360 Link.– 2 knowledge bases, 2 title lists– Activation or cancellation of e-resources in 2 systems– Not an accounting system

• Once the data is all there, how do we use it effectively and get rid of the other spreadsheets and shadow systems. They’re all still there!

• What reports will be useful?• Best as a regional solution.

Stranack, K. (2006, November). CUFTS: An Open Source Alternative for Serials Management. Serials Librarian, 51(2), 29-39. Retrieved October 8, 2008, from Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts database.

Questions?/ Thank you!

Bill Drew dreww@TC3.eduAndy Perry perrya@newpaltz.edu