RE: Innovative Millennium

["Anne Winnick" <awinnick at greenwichlibrary dot org>]

Hi Bobby-

For a fellow Hoosier, I'm happy to be of service! (BA Slavic Languages &
Literature, 1990) Is Marta Johnson still there? I used to work for her.

Anyway, I have used 3 different systems in my past 7 years in libraries:
GEAC/CLSI, Horizon and III.  Of the three I have worked the most with
innovative. III is the largest & most powerful of the three, but with
that comes more complications. You can customize coding in your
bib/item/order/checkin records to tag items and run reports. For
example, I run a report every month where we've coded bibs for deletion.
We do this as a batch, as we have to report our current holding to both
OCLC and our state union catalog. I have just finished a redesign of our
WebOPAC, which was possible mostly because III offered a staging port
where you could test the web display of your catalog before going live.
While all of this is wonderful, it also requires a LOT of training &
slogging through a very disorganized online manual. The Help Desk is
either inncredibly responsive and helpful, or rude and useless,
depending on who answers the call. However I'm sure that's true of most
vendors.

As for GEAC/CLSI, it was the first system I used & it was a very old
version. It was simple, and worked fairly well. The only thing was that
the patron  records & bib records were not well integrated so, for
example, you had to exit the checkout system to look up a patron's card
number (since they inevitably don't have their cards on them - but
that's a whole other issue!) Again, that was in 1998, and the library
where I was working at the time switched to III that year. During
migration, III offered excellent training. I do remember a pretty fair
amount of lost item & bib records, but after about a month, most of the
records were added back into the catalog.

I used Horizon very briefly when I woked at a pharmaceutical company
library. I only used the OPAC, and found the searching to be pretty
inefficient. There was very little opportunity to perform precise
searching, but we could have had a "dumbed down" version, since our
collection was so small.

In summary, if you're up for a challenge, III's system can do a LOT for
you as far as reporting and automating most library processes. However,
some would be daunted by the amount of technical knowledge you need.

Hope this helps!
Annie
(you can use my name & affiliation)

Anne Winnick
Resources Management Librarian
Greenwich Library
101 W. Putnam Ave.
Greenwich, CT 06830
203-622-7923 

-----Original Message-----
From: innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org
[mailto:innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org] On Behalf Of
rsimic at indiana dot edu
Sent: Monday, April 25, 2005 9:40 PM
To: innopac at innopacusers dot org
Subject: Innovative Millennium

Hi,

I'm a SLIS student at Indiana University.  I have to do a paper on an
automation system for a class, and I've chosen Innovative Millennium.  I
just was curious of the opinion the Millennium users have of the product
-- the pros and cons they've had, experiences during migration (from
another Innovative product or a non-innovative product), and the
patrons' reactions to Millennium.  These responses can be as detailed as
you'd like.  This paper is only going to my professor -- I have no
intention of publishing it -- but if you would like me to exclude your
name and library affiliation, I'd be more than happy to do so.  Thanks
for your time.

Sincerely,

Bobby Simic
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