How far have we come?

PLS provides the Libraries Board with a monthly status report on the One Card project.  As the end of February report has just come across my desk I thought I would share a few of the statistics from it with you.

With Burnside and Murray Bridge joining the consortium during February the system now covers 94% of the State's population; with 55 of the State's 68 councils are now included in the coverage.  This represents 72 separate library services which used to run on 56 different databases.

The system has 981,609 registered borrowers and 3,657,919 items listed in the catalogue.  To date the consortium has not done a great deal of work on de-duplicating the borrower file.  Therefore the number of registered borrowers is somewhat inflated & will be addressed as we move forward. As the user group decided that any customer de-duplication would require negotiations with customers this will be a relatively slow process. 

PLS is planning a major de-duplication of the bibliographic database (i.e. the catalogue - aka Enterprise).  Our early assessment is that approximately 100,000 bib records will be merged when the next de-duplication takes place in April.  While some of the de-duplication work can be automated, there will be an ongoing need for staff in libraries to continue to work on specific records to ensure that we work towards having a clean and accurate database.

The inclusion of Mallala and two of SA's larger regional towns in Whyalla and Pt Lincoln in March will continue the spread of the consortium to another 42,000 residents.