Page 153 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

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152 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.12, 2020

Inspirations from regional common platform in university libraries: Take
JULAC of Hong Kong as an example
〇a*
CAI Yingchun〇 & LIAO Bocheng
The unlimited resources required by library users and the eternal pursuit of easy access have
become two driving forces that promote the “change” and “growth” of libraries. The traditional
integrated management system used by a single library, or the management system used by digital
library alliance are unable to meet the needs of current users. This article explores the feasibility of
forming a regional alliance of university libraries, and using a shared library management platform
to achieve unified management of alliance members, with a view to providing new ideas for the
joint resources construction and sharing of university library resources.
By sorting out and summarizing the three development stages of the library management
systems, and taking the regional library consortium JULAC shared by the Hong Kong eight higher
education institutions as a concrete practice case, this article explores the feasibility of regional
university libraries alliance sharing one library management platform from three aspects: why we
build it, how we build it and the construction significance.
Through the overall planning and coordination between league members, the regional shared
library management platform could thoroughly break the restrictions and obstacles between
member libraries, and share the information inquiry, cooperative cataloging, coordinated
acquisition, joint storage, inter-library loan, and resource discovery. The whole business process
facilitates the service-oriented system framework and forms an ecological information resource
management system with comprehensive coverage and convenient use. The migration of every
large-scale library management system will encounter various problems and challenges in the
process of deploying a new system. Taking the migration to the Alma system as an example is
obviously not enough to cover all LSP cases. Each library needs to continuously refine and perfect
the functions with the new system in practice.
The realization of the shared library management platform provides more cooperation
opportunities for regional college library alliances, and opens new avenues for library’s service
innovation as well. It can not only establish complete life-cycle management for library resources,
integrate resources acquisition and resources management workflow but also intensify the
ecological construction and evaluation of resources among regional library alliance, and strengthen
the inter-library sharing services across all the member libraries.
At present, it is more common for individual library to bring in LSP to address the isolated
resources management issue within this library, but it is even more prominent when applied to
a regional shared platform of university libraries. The co-construction and sharing of physical
collections between regional libraries in China are still in the stages of joint cataloging, document
delivery, interlibrary loan, etc, while the construction of a regional shared platform can form a
* Correspondence should be addressed to CAI Yingchun, Email: cyingc@shnu.edu.cn, ORCID: 0000-0002-7736-2267.