ViTaL

I glad to say that Metalib is now installed on our server at the Natural History Museum here in London. My colleagues in the library here are now working with me to configure the system. It's a significant piece of work, in that we are ultimately trying to support users from 27 diffrerent institutions around Europe under the umbrella of a single instance of the Ex Libris suite of applications. We are pushing the envelope somewhat, with much trial and error involved.

We are currently testing different approaches to the problem of giving each institution their own set of search pages. I believe we will be using the Metalib 'portal' feature to support this, combined with setting up resource categories for each EDIT parner, so we can maximise the quality of the results by taking into account institutional subscriptions and language preferences.

While the deep configuration work is going on, I will be contacting our partner libraries to get more of their Z39.50 and other details to add to our knowledgebase which runs behind Metalib.

You may have noticed a recent flurry of activity on the site regarding a new feature which we will be piloting soon. This is a system allowing interested users to post requests for the scanning of specific items, e.g. books, ranges of journal volumes and so on, which are currently unavailable in electronic form. ViTaL is not involved directly with any scanning projects, but this service will be available to the administrators of such projects. We hope that this will help the prioritization and scheduling of scanning for projects like the BHL and others. I have asked colleagues with interests in botany and microbiology to test the initial version of the request system. So far it seems to be working as we would like.

I plan to set up a separate RSS feed for scanning requests which should help with the general dissemination of the information.

It should be noted that requests for items covered by copyright are unlikely to result in the creation of a scanned version unless a licenced can be obtained from the copyright holder. As mentioned above, all scanning will be done by external scanning projects, and these projects will have thier own policies relating to copyright. Ultimately, the administrators of the scanning projects will decide what is scanned.