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lLLINET Online, the statewide academic library online catalog that we have been using since 1980, has been updated with a search engine that more closely approximates the look and functionality of other web-based search engines such as those for our periodicals databases. At the same time, the new online catalog retains the traditional functions of your being able to borrow from other libraries using your Millikin ID, and also your being able to initiate interlibrary loans yourself from the online catalog. We have named this new catalog MILLINET Online.
This change-over was our principal summer 2002 project. Fortunately, most of us on the library staff already had considerable prior expertise and experience with such major computer system migration. Still, there was a mountain of data decisions and conversions to be accomplished, new workstation-specific software (client modules) to install and configure, not to mention learning the specifics of new software for all day-to-day computer activities. Some highlights:
 Two of our librarians, Jen Masciadrelli and Susan Avery, served on different statewide committees working on perfecting and customizing the new system. They each put in many hours on this work, in conference calls and intermittent visits to Champaign.
All of our bibliographic records and associated we-own-it records were loaded into the new system (some 300,000 records total); and then Linda Chitwood, our Cataloging Associate, quality-checked those records against our pre-selected representative records.
Linda Rash, Periodicals Associate, worked with several other staff members to create about 900 grids for recording ongoing daily receipt of periodicals subscription issues. Using those grids, we make sure that we are actually receiving the periodicals we should be receiving; and we will also be displaying that same information in the public catalog.
Marsha Leach, Acquisitions Associate and Office Manager, implemented our revised library materials fund structure and also created about one hundred (so far) vendor and publisher records, this in the service of ordering materials and keeping track of what we spend on various categories of materials.
The Circulation Desk staff (Cindy Dothager, Circulation Desk Supervisor, and Gavena Dahlman & Ben Gardner, Circulation Associates) reviewed the accuracy of the newly transferred borrower address records (approximately 5,000) as well as attendant loan records (what people have borrowed and not yet returned).
Jen Masciadrelli continues to be our project coordinator in the library, making sure that all the implementation details are being attended to.
The system is not yet quite fully implemented, with the Universal Catalog (the records from all 45 participating libraries) and Universal Borrowing (which draws on the Universal Catalog) still being perfected. However, it is now the most up to date record of what we own, and is the catalog that you will be using from now on.
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