Departments - Systems - Hamilton College

Libraries, Staff, Hours . . .

Systems Department

Page Index

Overview
Managed Systems
Staff

Overview

The Library Information Systems Department has overall responsibility for computer systems used by both library staff and library patrons, including off-campus access to subscribed services and databases. We work closely with ITS and other College departments on integrated, campus-wide systems projects: wireless networking, printing, the Hill Card, Blackboard, and the campus portal.

Library Information Systems supports 60 public PCs, 50 staff computers and 10 networked printers in the Library and its branches. We manage hardware and software for the library's integrated library system and online catalog (ALEX) and maintain and develop software for our digital collections.

Systems administrators are on duty on the first floor of Burke Library from Monday through Friday, 7:30AM - 5:00PM. We can be reached at 859-4487 or 859-4493. If we are not available, please leave a brief message and a contact phone number.

Managed Systems

ALEX, the online catalog
ALEX is the local instance of the ExLibris Group's Voyager integrated library system public interface. The full systems includes Acquisitions, Cataloging, Circulation, and Interlibrary Loan software modules.
EZProxy
EZProxy is software that gives Hamilton College ID holders permission to use any of the Library's user-restricted databases from off-campus locations around the world. EZProxy is hosted on a Windows 2003 server.
CONTENTdm
The Library uses CONTENTdm to deliver its Digital Collections. Most images are delivered in JPEG2000 format and many of manuscripts have been encoded in TEI which is indexed for searching purposes in eXist.
eXist
The Library stores TEI-encoded versions of textual materials from the Special Collection and Rare Books and Archives departments in eXist, an XML database. The TEI files are queried by PHP using XQuery and delivered in XHTML using CSS and XSLT stylesheets. Example: The Shaker Manifesto.

Staff

Ken Herold, Director of Library Information Systems
E-mail: kherold@hamilton.edu
Telephone: (315) 859-4487

Duties:
Contact Ken if you have questions or problems regarding Library user IDs (on the reverse-side of your HillCard) and passwords; connecting to the Internet or your networked storage space from the Library; accessing ALEX, Library databases, or e-journals; or connecting to resources from off-campus. Ken directs all aspects of Library automation: our servers, the Voyager integrated library system, the public online catalog (ALEX), and proxy service. He programs add-ons to facilitate workflow and writes custom reports from Oracle. Ken is currently the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) contact for Hamilton College.

Peter MacDonald, Library Information Systems Specialist
E-mail: pmacdona@hamilton.edu
Telephone: (315) 859-4493

Duties:
Contact Peter for problems with the operation of staff or public desktop PCs in the Library, such as, keyboard, mouse, local printers and scanners, software, e-mail, virus protection, and personal file backups. Peter programs the customized interface to ALEX, manages the Library Web pages and the Digital Collections Website, and generates statistics on usage of our E-Reserves and Web pages.

Examples