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The CILT Knowledge Centre serves members across 30 countries with access to over 4,000 trade journals and 10,000 company profiles. Soutron gave their team the tools to catalog faster, index smarter, and prepare for the next generation of member services.
The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (UK) is the professional body for everyone in the logistics, passenger transport, transport planning and related industries and is dedicated to supporting, developing and representing all fields at all stages of career development. CILT is represented in more than 30 countries across the world, and is aimed at helping members to realize their ambitions and to progress throughout their career by supporting continuous professional development.
Growth of its overseas sections led to a restructuring in 1994 under which 10 national councils were established in various parts of the world. The Institute operates as a coordinating body and custodian of the Royal Charter.
“Until we saw Soutron, we did not appreciate what time savings we might be able to achieve.”
Peter Huggins
Knowledge Centre Manager
Central to the valuable information that CILT provides is The Knowledge Centre, a dedicated resource for Institute members. The Knowledge Centre is Europe’s largest logistics and transport library, accessible in person or online, including ‘The Knowledge Bank’ with remote access to full text articles from more than 4,000 trade journals, 600 abstracted journals, over 1,100 country economic reports, 10,000 company profiles and 1,600 reports from Datamonitor.
It is therefore essential that the library’s housekeeping systems for cataloging and processing materials are extremely efficient. The online catalog is accessible via the internet to members 24 hours a day seven days a week and is the visible face of the Knowledge Centre.
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CILT has close affiliations with similar institutes and professional groups in different parts of the world. There is a requirement for all these organizations to share their data across country boundaries. It was deemed essential to improve the access mechanisms to support these initiatives, for example by integrating a multi-lingual thesaurus to the catalog and enabling multi-lingual capability.
For the past ten years Soutron has supplied library automation systems to CILT including Help Desk support and hosting facilities for their OPAC and other systems. As the Institute strives for greater efficiencies, Peter looked for ways that he and his team could improve their daily routines and prepare for new services that are planned for the Knowledge Centre.
Peter evaluated Soutron, the new Library Management System launched by Soutron. He was impressed with library workflows and the tight integration of the thesaurus to improve indexing and retrieval in the OPAC. Being able to change terminology in one place and see it reflected across all records instantly was seen to be a major time saving benefit. The facility to have multilingual terms would improve access for the broader audience of the Institute as would support for Unicode.
But the acquisition and cataloging workflows could save significant amounts of time when processing bibliographic materials for the different collections and multiple copies. “We have to find extra time in our day without adding more staff so that we can do more”, says Peter. “That plus the simple and intuitive interface that comes with Soutron’s new system means that we should be able to reduce training and let others work in the system remotely.
Until we saw Soutron we did not appreciate what time savings we might be able to achieve because we have been very happy using our present system. The Knowledge Centre is preparing itself for another very busy year but we have made the commitment to migrate to the new system which will be installed in the near future.”
The major difference with this system compared to others supplied by Soutron is that it will be hosted by Soutron at their Data Center and so will not require any involvement from the client’s IT department whatsoever.
The IT Manager at the Institute, like many other membership organizations, is always under pressure to do lots of things.
The Knowledge Centre will have one place to call on for support of their automated systems thus saving precious time for their IT department. “This will be our 3rd generation of system from Soutron”, says Peter. “They seem to really understand the direction in which libraries are heading and manage to stay 3 steps ahead, always providing an easy and cost effective migration path”.
To learn more about The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (UK), visit their website at:
www.ciltuk.org.uk
To find out how you can migrate to a fast, secure, cloud-based information management system to support your membership institute and special library, book a 20 minute discovery call with us today, see below.
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The first step is to learn more. Here's how we can answer your questions:
Yes. Soutron includes an integrated multilingual thesaurus and Unicode support, making it suitable for professional institutes serving international memberships. CILT used these features to improve catalog access for members across more than 30 countries.
Yes. Soutron hosts the library management system at their own data center, removing any infrastructure or support burden from the client's IT team. CILT specifically chose this model to free up internal IT resources.
Yes. Soutron is designed to manage complex collections across multiple formats and copy sets. The CILT Knowledge Centre includes access to over 4,000 trade journals, 600 abstracted journals, 10,000 company profiles, and 1,600 research reports, all managed within the Soutron system.
Yes. Soutron's OPAC is accessible online around the clock. CILT members can search the Knowledge Centre catalog at any time, from any location, with the system hosted and maintained by Soutron.
