My Knowledge Portal

The School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) Library is located at the third floor of the Main Library, Gonzalez Hall. Its primary role is to serve the needs of the faculty, students and researchers of the university. And in order to provide the services that they offer, they are using different Information Retrieval Systems (IRS) i.e. UP Integrated Library (iLib) system and the Micro-CDS/ISIS.

iLib system is an in-house developed library system of the University of the Philippines. It replaced its predecessor, the Maelissa library system last 2008 since they were having serious problems with the latter. Even in migrating their collection, one of the problems raised then was that there were some data that were lost like for instance the location of the book and the type of material. After the restoration, they were able to use up to date the iLib system. They were able to save 300$ for the maintenance fee every year and other fees such as customization fee, etc.

In addition to those advantages, one of the benefits that Mrs. Soledad Fonseca, Head Librarian of SLIS Library, mentioned is the encoding system for cataloging. She said that once she encoded this particular book or bibliographic information, the system automatically saves the record so she needs not to retype it again and again. This is also true for serial collections. Aside from this, she also added that the interface of the system is good and easy to navigate. It has more search parameters like you can search using author, title and/or subject. You may also limit your search by publication year, type of material and/or format. The use of icons and sorting features also help the users to easily identify the library materials they are looking for. Furthermore, each and every user is given an account to check if the status of the materials they borrowed and even to reserve books. If they forgot to return the books on time, the system will send an alert to the UP Webmail account of the borrower to remind him/her about her overdue book. Other features such as add cart, sending feedbacks etc. are also present in the iLib system.

Aside from this one, another information retrieval of the SLIS Library is the Micro CDS/ISIS, a UNESCO produced software package. Its main use as of now is for thesis search but unfortunately, only Ma’am Sol is the one who can navigate and use it. Its interface is not that user friendly since its using DOS and the search parameters is also poor since it uses word-based index or only keywords may be used in searching. Most of the users are not familiar with the system and nobody is teaching how to use it, not unless you’ll ask the librarians to teach you how to navigate it. By the way, Ma’am Sol is still updating the thesis collection in CDS/ISIS J since it is much easier to copy-and-paste it into the website.

Above everything else, the number one problem that Ma’am Sol raised was that when the internet is down. Since the iLib is web-based, they cannot use it for a time but since they are near the server, they can still use it using Intranet.