By Cal State Long Beach students will see a number of changes to the University Library’s website and database that, according to Associate of Dean of University Library Tracey Mayfield, will revolutionize the way CSULB students, faculty and staff do their research.
The launch of the new system will be June 20 in order give the library a month in between the unveiling and first day of fall semester. Mayfield said that this is to make sure both the website and database are up and running with minimal error before students come back to campus in August.
These changes include an entirely new database that allows users to not only search the University Library for necessary texts, articles or essays — but now, students can access the libraries of all 23 Cal State University campuses through a single search bar. Additionally, the University Library website will receive a makeover similar to the stylistic format of CSULB’s official webpage.
The new search bar, in particular, is expected by University Library officials to have a great impact on the scope of research students and faculty are able to exercise through the database. While previous students doing research were often referred to smaller, external databases when the University Library search failed them — come fall 2017, Mayfield says students will be able to find consolidated information on a clean, user-friendly interface.
While this change is coming in June, University Library officials have been working in a “test period” with their new data system for about a year.
According to Mayfield, the changes have been a long time coming, as moves to integrate and compile the CSU library databases have been ongoing since the late ‘90s. The efforts began with the CSU-wide implementation of PeopleSoft, which is the software implemented for websites such as MyCSULB. However, Mayfield said that various campuses used the software in different ways, and this did not result in the uniformity that the CSU had hoped for.
Following the integration of PeopleSoft, Mayfield said that CSU libraries began attempting to develop their own way to compile information system-wide so that it could be more accessible to students and more cost-effective for library staff. This increasing need to pool and share resources among CSU libraries grew throughout the years, according to Mayfield, and eventually resulted in the Unified Library Management System, which was created in 2015 by the Council of Library Deans specifically to work toward integrating all CSU library databases.
According to Mayfield, out of ULMS came the “Libraries of the Future Task Force,” which was a group consisting of six southern California-based campuses: CSULB, Cal State Northridge, Cal State Dominguez Hills, Cal State Fullerton, Cal State LA and Cal Poly Pomona. This task force focused on analyzing, consolidating and circulating their data for a year and a half while seeking out alternative methods to compiling data among sister schools.
The team referred to the Orbis Cascade Alliance, which is a library consortium serving many academic libraries throughout the Northwestern United States. The consortium hosts 39 members in colleges in Washington, Oregon and Idaho and serves as a method of sharing and distributing knowledge in an increasingly technical world. Through the Orbis Cascade Alliance, the Libraries of the Future Task Force discovered Ex Libris, a software that develops integrated library systems for universities.
The task force had found its new software that would finally allow the research and data collected in CSU libraries to be shared with the tap of a trackpad.
“The idea was — instead of behaving like 23 systems and everybody doing their own cataloguing and everybody doing their own thing, why not harness the power of the 23 campuses and try to do things a little bit more collaboratively?” Mayfield said.
Eventually, the efforts of the task force manifested in the “Libraries of the Future” report.
This report was brought to the CSU Chancellor’s Office, and all libraries within the CSU system received $2 million in order to move forward with carving out a contract with Ex Libris, or “seed money,” as Mayfield referred to it.
“We’re just culminating a two-year process,” said librarian and collection development officer Carol Perruso, who has been working with other librarians in order to gauge feedback on Ex Libris. Perruso said that the moment the bid for Ex Libris was awarded, CSULB began training library staff extensively on the changes that the software would bring, and that the one-year test period served as a transitional platform for the staff.
Mayfield said that the entire purpose behind reenergizing the website and reconfiguring the CSUs library database on the whole was for student accessibility, convenience and success. While Mayfield anticipates that these changes will come as a surprise, she and her staff are confident and hopeful that CSULB students and faculty will be able to gather more information from a higher number of sources with even more ease.
The changes will be accessible come summer.
