Southeastern NY Library Resources Council (SENYLRC) has been selected for the NNLM MAR Technology Immersion Award. Tessa Killian, Manager of Technology and Administrative Services, and Patricia Carroll-Mathes, Manager, Hospital Library Services Program will serve as co-project directors. SENYLRC, a multi-type library consortiumthat includes hospitals and special libraries, is well positioned to provide web discovery portals and offer enhanced catalog tools to health sciences libraries that do not have the technical infrastructure, money or expertise to create their own. 

Building upon 10 years of development and service delivery experience, SENYLRC will demonstrate the use of open source software applications to improve upon existing  web-based services and deliver a next-generation searching and retrieval capability to member libraries in the SENYLRC region. Two RML member libraries will work with SENYLRC staff and contracted programmers to provide additional functionality , test and evaluate Koha integrated library system software, and create new individual library website templates using the Drupal content management system. 

The project will result in separate instances of a discovery platform for each library, allowing them to better target and serve the needs of their unique user community. Through this pilot project, SENYLRC staff will acquire the necessary experience with open source software (Koha and Drupal),  and develop a  new Drupal module – an  electronic resource management system to enable SENYLRC staff to more easily administer shared electronic resources links on the SENYLRC-hosted multiple library websites.

After development, these applications of open source software will be made freely available to the  medical library community for other consortia and/or multi- institutions to adopt or adapt to meet their own service needs. The pilot health science libraries will be Vassar Brother Medical Center (VBMC) in Poughkeepsie, New York, and Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research (NKI) in Orangeburg, New York. Upon successful completion of the development and pilot implementation phase,  SENYLRC will migrate other hospital libraries to the new services and offer them to other special libraries.