Technical Services Interest Group

I would love to hear opinions on TinyCat and LibraryThing. I'd be interested in other low cost ILS too.

Currently we use Horizon and are down to less than 100,000 item records for physical items. We've been aggressively weeding and purchasing electronic copies over the past 5 years. We're working towards a 100% online library for our students, but will likely make it to 99%. I anticipate keeping <5,000 books at one campus location, hence the 99%.

If you don't have experience in TinyCat or low cost options - but have experience with ILS management and migrations - I'd love to hear your "keep this mind..." comments!

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Mary Snyder
Convener for ACRL - Librarianship in For-Profit Educational Institutions DG
University Librarian @ Strayer University
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Thank you! Did you create the item records in LibraryThing or did you import MARC records from elsewhere?

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Mary Snyder
Convener for ACRL - Librarianship in For-Profit Educational Institutions DG
University Librarian @ Strayer University
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Original Message:
Sent: Apr 29, 2021 10:44 AM
From: Ginny Moran
Subject: Opinions on TinyCat and LibraryThing

I use TinyCat for the synagogue library where I coordinate our library committee. Feel free to contact me with any questions. My experience has been that it works pretty well, and is a great solution for small collections. 

Ginny

--
Ginny Moran, MLIS

she/her/hers
Fine Arts & Humanities Instruction & Research Librarian
DeWitt Wallace Library/MacalesterCollege

Living and working on Wahpekute land
http://bit.ly/GinnyApptHours

Original Message:
Sent: 4/29/2021 5:46:00 PM
From: Mary Snyder
Subject: RE: Opinions on TinyCat and LibraryThing

Thank you! Did you create the item records in LibraryThing or did you import MARC records from elsewhere?

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Mary Snyder
Convener for ACRL - Librarianship in For-Profit Educational Institutions DG
University Librarian @ Strayer University
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After trying some other options, I've settled on LT and TinyCat for our church library (5000+ items). You lose some of the finesse of a totally MARC-based system, but it has the critical functions I need in an OPAC: author, title, keyword, and limiting by format & language. The one area that is less developed is subject searching, but I worked around that by using the tags with a simplified subject thesaurus based on LC subject headings. I had to double up on some things to get the "faceting" I wanted (e.g. the tag "Matthew--Commentaries" always accompanied by the tag "Matthew" so the user can broaden out from the "Commentaries" subdivision).

A huge factor in settling on this was its practicality for our situation. It's web-based, so you don't have to know how to set up a system on a server (or depend on volunteer church IT staff to do it). It gives you a lot of features for a low price (we're on the paying plan since we passed the 5,000-volume ceiling for the free version). And it's easy enough to maintain that it I'll be able to hand it over to a volunteer with a reasonable amount of training.

David
Cataloger, Mary Coutts Burnett Library
Texas Christian University
(the library where I get paid, not the library where I am using LT/TinyCat)

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David Hamrick
Cataloger
Texas Christian University, Mary Coutts Burnett Library
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