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NOTEbooks for Lotus Notes reviews
Our company is considering the NOTEbookS software for circulation, serials and monographs cataloging, etc. We are considering a library software system which interfaces well with Lotus Notes and the Web. I would appreciate it very much if you have used or considered the product to answer the following questions.
Response 1 The Fortune 500 company I work for recently bought NOTEbookS to enter the digital age. We had (have a card catalog for our 2000 volumes, employ Datatrek Serials Manager 7.0 (DOS!!!) for our 200 periodicals and NOTES is our enterprise system. I am the serials librarian. We are a small corporate library. The Director (not a Librarian) is very interested in increasing access to a substantial number of market research reports the company has commissioned over the years and additionally would like to establish a database for competitive analysis (the first try at this crashed, but perhaps this was because they set it up to run on a spreadsheet(!?)). Anyway, the RESEARCH part of the NOTEbookS package was especially attractive to our director. Perhaps this is a good time to let you know that I am a second year library student who did a paper last summer before we signed off on NOTEbookS entitled <Going Digital> for my Problems in the Organization of Materials course in which I suggested as strongly as I could (considering my position and 6 months with the company) that it was my sense that when you decide to automate a library you should buy library automation software. Let me look at your questions: 1) What is your current experience with using NOTEbookS? Please specify your likes and dislikes about the product features. I am presently in the process of entering the aforementioned 200 periodicals into the system. Periodicals are ornery to begin with, with their vigorous variations of terms, titles, Volume #'s, dates, claims, overdues, etc ...NOTEbookS has required fields for volume, issue number, 1st date receive. This is as it should be. The problem is that the system doesn't seem to do anything with this information. When the year changes and say 12 numbers have been received, other products (at least my old faithful DATATREK) turn a new leaf and begin a new volume set. NOTEbookS doesn't. I have spoken with customer service about this and have been told that all I have to do at the beginning of the year is enter the new volume info and start over again. This is just what I want to do for 200 periodicals every January. One of the cooler aspects of NOTEbookS is its ability to create NOTES hotlinks to websites. Many of our periodicals maintain sites now and I have been reviewing them for potential interest. The only problem here is that when I'm setting up the initial subscription, there's no <richtext field> to take the URL. I must complete the Master Subscription Document, save it to the general catalog, then switch to the main catalog and edit the <contents> field, inserting the appropriate URL. If an end-user wants to search only the Serials catalog, they'll never know there's a link with the record; these links only appear in the combined <union> catalog (which also doesn't contain the Research database - I don't think...) I have mentioned this to the customer service person and have been told they are working on providing a rich text field in the serials data entry form so one will not have to go through all the rigmarole just described. I am responsible for routing certain periodicals throughout our firm. DATATREK quite competently batch processes and prints out routing slips, four to a page. I simply cut them apart and affix them to the covers and off they go. NOTEbookS has no ability to batch these items and uses a whole sheet of 8.5x11.0 paper for each routing slip. Tres economical! I might point out too that while it's processing check-ins, it's coffee time...take a walk. My peer who's doing the books has said that their web-retriever is pretty clunky bringing in the remote MARC records. 2) How is the vendor support, installation, and customer service? The support, from my limited aspect is adequate. The customer service has been fine. Whether they will incorporate the changes into the product remains to be seen. 3) If you have multisite libraries, how do you ensure seamless service using NOTEbookS? We're a long way from a multi-site installation. I think there's a 2-year old NOTEbook installation in Ohio that you should talk to before signing on. 4) Do you also use Lotus Notes in your organization? If so, how do you take advantage of the 2 systems together? I am pretty new to NOTES. I don't have much else to do with it than this product and e-mail. I suspect that one of NOTEbookS big attractions is that end-users may be expected to be immediately comfortable with its procedures and commands. I am uncertain how NOTES- or even how computer-literate this company is. 5) If you have the NOTEbookS system linked to the Intranet, what is your experience in this area? We're not that far along yet. Our installation was over New Years. I'm probably about halfway done with the periodicals and am not yet really into a parallel test. I don't know how many books have been cataloged or how many of the fancy custom research reports have been entered. I guess all-in-all I think the product leaves lots (LOTS & LOTS) to be desired. Perhaps the end-user will like some of the features, i.e. article requests, research queries, automated reserves and check-out (we don't circulate that many books annually (100's?). We're basically a business research center. I think that from my perspective in Serials it's going to really be a chore to keep things up to date and in order. There will be a lot of hand work in maintaining the serials catalog - which to me seems to defeat the purpose of <automating> the catalog in the first place. I don't think the promised work process gains are likely to be achieved.
Response 2 1) What is your current experience with using NOTEbookS? My frustrations with this software match those I have with Lotus Notes. My previous experience was with Inmagic and DBText which have much more precise search engines and I find easier report design generation--with Inmagic I could manage and configure the databases as I wished--that was also a drawback, because customizing took time; however I very much liked that flexibility. With Lotus Notes, you are totally dependent on the programmers. 2) How is the vendor support, installation, and customer service? I can't speak to vendor support as that is all handled at a higher level within my firm. 3) If you have multisite libraries, how do you ensure seamless service using NOTEbookS? Each location has its own catalog Lotus Notes NOTEbookS database and they replicate in the way that Lotus Notes is designed to do. 4) Do you also use Lotus Notes in your organization? If so, how do you take advantage of the 2 systems together? We make extensive use of Lotus Notes within our firm--anyone who wants to can add the catalog and related databases to their Lotus Notes Workspace and proceed to access them. 5) If you have the NOTEbookS system linked to the intranet, what is your experience in this area? We have not linked the NOTEbookS system to the Intranet.
Response 3 Last week I posted a question
regarding using library automation in a Lotus Notes environment. Special
thanks goes to Shonna Froebel, Ilana Lutman, Jan Kamholtz, Debra Moore,
Angela Norrell, Ty Webb, and Cathy Wright for alerting me to products
and vendors I was not aware of. I also received some attached files on KIM (a Word 97 doc and Powerpoint presentation) that I would be happy to e-mail to anyone who is interested in Lotus Notes library systems.
Edited on September 23, 2005 |