Empower staff by helping them to do more

In 2001, Bryant University's Douglas and Judith Krupp Library joined a local academic consortium with a shared ILS. This collaboration worked well while students were still largely using books and microfilm. However, Director of Library Services Mary Moroney explained, "The library landscape was changing. We were buying e-books and e-book packages, but we weren't really managing those that well. Over the years, we began to use multiple platforms for different vendors: different vendor for A-to-Z, link resolver, discovery skin, interlibrary loan, and cataloging. So we just had this mish-mash of things trying to connect and work well with each other, which didn’t always happen."

At the same time, the library's budget stayed flat, sharing within the consortium declined, and consortium fees increased. "We had an opportunity, and we thought we were going to take it," explained Patricia Lombardi, Head of Collection Management and Digital Services. The library implemented WorldShare^® Management Services (WMS) in 2015, "And we haven't looked back yet. We've been thrilled," she added.

"We realize now that our former ILS was just a partial one," Mary said. "We were already using OCLC for interlibrary loan and cataloging, and when it's all in one system, you can easily see efficiencies." Patricia added, "We sync our interlibrary loan with… [WorldShare] Circulation, and that's just been amazing. …Once you receive the item, everything gets updated." For the first time, Bryant students can now track their ILL requests. In addition, the staff achieved a long-time goal of implementing patron-driven acquisition through WMS. "We wanted that to be just integrated in our catalog," Patricia said. "It's been very successful, so we're thrilled."

The staff also appreciate how WMS keeps their catalog up to date with WorldCat data. As Patricia explained, "We know that we have the most current record and that if that record is updated, we don't have to do anything. We just get the update automatically." She added, "The knowledge base… has been absolutely fantastic," especially how easy it is to add library holdings to e-content collections.

WMS's budget management and reporting tools enable library staff to show the administration where and how they're spending money and how often students and faculty use library resources. Patricia said that WMS puts this data into graphs "right at our fingertips." This also helps the library see how much money they're saving and make decisions about how to spend it. "We have saved a significant amount of money," Patricia continued. "It's enabled us to add some databases that we always wanted but weren't able to do before and to really focus on curriculums" that needed more support.

Finally, Patricia noted, "We can envision our future. We've seen in the short time period that we've been with WMS how things are constantly improving, enhancements are constantly being made. …The efficiencies and everything of how we're doing things today, we can see that just continuing to improve as WMS gets momentum and continues to do these enhancements."

Library at a glance

• Located in Bryant's George E. Bello Center for Information and Technology
• Serves more than 3,700 students, including nearly 400 students on the Bryant campus in Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, China
• Special collections include items from Bryant's 153-year history