Extracting relevant information about…

Posted on: April 27th, 2023 by Papp Ildikó

‘Extracting relevant information about preferences of the customers from the transaction records of integrated library management systems’ by András Simon

Abstract: Thesis/Objective – The world outside the libraries is changing rapidly, and these changes are extremely speeded up by the effects of the restrictions ordered because of Covid 19. It is worth to give new aspects for creating and using library statistics, in the way extracting information from the transaction records of integrated library management systems, hence the analysis of these records seems one of the most appropriate way to follow the changes of the customer’s attitude. Method – The databases of the Integrated Library Management Systems contain these data units beside other records, like loan, bibliographic, item or authority records. The transaction records are created by the application, preserving the information, logged by the program. These records are preserved for long time in the database even if the logged transaction itself is terminated, or the original record is deleted. Analysing large number of loan records we can follow the changes and can ascertain trends for the past two years too. As the employee of Qulto Companies (Qulto Companies – https://qulto.eu), a firm developing integrated collection management systems for libraries and museums in East-Central Europe I have the permission, and the necessary knowledge to examine the catalogues of our customers. The MARC based data structure of these software is widely used by library and museum automatization systems in Europe, so the Middle-European experiences for data extraction could be seen, as generally valid in the future. Results – There is a significant decrease according to the count of active library users or to the number of loan transactions. There is some difference between the loan and user counts according to library type. In the high school libraries, the decrease doesn’t seem to have any connection with the Covid 19 restrictions, in the case of the other library types it can be the result of them. Hence there was no difference between the tendencies of the decrease according to geographical position or size of the library. Conclusion – The transaction records of Integrated Library Management Systems are very useful we can gain very important information about our libraries. so, we should take care for preserving them, or at least we have to get the most important units of information from them before they are erased.

The whole article in English  is available here or can be accessed via this link.

Aspects of the Long-Term Preservation of Digitized Catalogue Data

Posted on: November 18th, 2021 by Papp Ildikó
Aspects of the Long-Term Preservation of Digitized Catalogue Data: Analysis of the Databases of Integrated Collection Management Systems

The Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture (PDT&C) international journal’s latest publication offers the scientific analysis of András Simon, our colleague and his co-author, Péter Kiszl.

Abstract of the article

During this research, the catalogues of more than 200 libraries and museums of Hungary and its neighboring countries were examined. The authors calculated the amount and the size of the metadata and of the full content records in the databases of their collection management systems, as well as the size and the type of the full content data and the size of the databases. By analyzing the results, the goal was to answer the following three questions: (1) Can any significant difference be established between the results according to country, nationality, or type of institution?; (2) How large is a metadata record or a full content record?; (3) Is it possible to establish a methodology for selecting a representative sample of institutions to facilitate further research? For planning the costs of data management, the size of the databases, the number of metadata records, and the variability of metadata and media records shall all be considered. A distinction should be made between the indispensable “primary” data to be preserved for a long time, and the “secondary” data units which are derived from the primary data. It is investigated in this article how to establish the size of primary data in the databases of collection management systems.

The entire work is available here:

Simon András and Kiszl Péter: Aspects of the Long-Term Preservation of Digitized Catalogue Data: Analysis of the Databases of Integrated Collection Management Systems Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture, vol. 50, no. 2, 2021, pp. 51-64. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/pdtc-2021-0007