Heritage IV: new system installation at Central School of Speech and Drama
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040716 |
| Published date | 01 February 1999 |
| Pages | 24-33 |
| Date | 01 February 1999 |
| Author | J. Adam Edwards |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Heritage IV: new
system installation at
Central School of
Speech and Drama
by J. Adam Edwards, Head of Learning
and Information Services, Central
School of Speech and Drama
Central School of Speech and Drama is an
HEFCE funded specialist theatre college in
north London. The move to a new library in the
summer of
1997
gave us the space and the
network to upgrade from our old CAIRS
system. The article describes how we chose
Inheritance Systems Heritage IV and some of
the useful facilities the system offers.
Background
Central School of Speech and Drama is a specialist
theatre college funded by the HEFCE having
formerly been funded as part of the polytechnic
sector under the PCFCE. Famous alumni include
Lawrence Olivier, Errol Flynn, Dawn French,
Jennifer Saunders, Jennifer Ehle, Peter Davison
and Stephen Tomkinson.
The School is home to around 750 students and 90
staff.
We train students at foundation, undergradu-
ate and postgraduate level in three main areas:
• Performance, including a specialist voice
MA, one of only three such courses in the
world.
• Theatre practice, which at undergraduate
level covers thirteen strands from set design
to puppetry and is about to add a unique fast
track BA circus course linked to the
Millennium Dome.
• Drama education, a degree complimented
by two PGCE courses and a distance
learning MA.
The School has two sites in north west London, the
main site at Swiss Cottage and a smaller site on St
Pancras Way in Camden.
The author was appointed in August 1997 to be the
first Head of Learning and Information Services (at
the time Learning Resources), which brought
together computer, library and media services on
both sites. The main library houses some 20,000
books, a collection of specialist
journals,
a large
collection of videos and a growing collection of
multimedia CD-ROMs. The St Pancras Way site
has a small collection of books and a few journals.
Why change?
In summer 1997 we moved into a new library on
the main site. Instead of two cramped rooms
containing 4 reader spaces ( one of which had to be
used by the library cataloguer!) we gained three
floors of the new East Block. The service was thus
transformed from one where little space forced
provision to be very staff intensive to where large
amounts of space (designed in the expectation of
1000 students) meant a change to a much greater
degree of self service use. The building is fully
cabled, to allow access to the Internet and shared
resources.
With the move came the existing CAIRS system
running on three 386 PCs. The system had no
OPAC, so all catalogue searches had to be done at
the counter on the single terminal. CAIRS stored
each accession as a separate item, so ten copies of
a book created ten records. Keyword searching
could be a long winded process of wading through
multiple records. Results could only be searched
sequentially and were displayed in the order they
had been catalogued. The system could not be used
to provide a viable self service OPAC.
Circulation was by two part slip, the circulation
module on CAIRS having not been implemented at
that time. (The original plan was to implement
circulation once the new library had settled down.)
With the opening of the new library, usage shot up
as suddenly the book stock became much more
visible, indeed students were convinced that we
had bought more books. This put huge strain on
the paper system, with staff spending hours filing
paper issue slips.
The system could not be networked to St Pancras
Way or to other workstations over the network
24 — VINE 115
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