Colegio de La Salle, in Bogotá, is a bilingual school with a library in each section: one for secondary school and a children’s one. When it decided to move its library to Janium, its collection did not live in a library system, but in a spreadsheet: an Excel list with four columns per book —author, title, publisher and year—. Today it runs a system in the cloud that catalogs, circulates and publishes its catalog online. This case recounts how the conversion was done and what they have now.
What an Excel list is missing
Four fields are enough to know which books there are, but not to run a library. With a list of author, title, publisher and year you cannot search by subject, you cannot tell apart two authors with the same name, you cannot group one author’s work under a normalized form, and above all you cannot circulate: a spreadsheet does not know who has which book or when it is due back. Going from that list to a system that catalogs and circulates, field by field and by hand, is the work that many small libraries put off for years.
The conversion, with enrichment
To avoid retyping every record, Janium processed the list with Collect, its internal AI-powered metadata extraction tool. The school did not contract Collect: it was the means by which the conversion was done.
From the author and the title, Collect identified each work and produced a complete record in MARC21/RDA. Beyond the four source fields, each record came out with a summary note, normalized subject headings and between 16 and 33 fields. There were 2,423 titles from the secondary school library and 410 from the children’s one, processed in four days.
Quality is not taken on faith: Collect evaluates each record and scores it according to its completeness and how well it could be backed up, and flags with a visible note those that fall below the threshold. That is what makes it possible to review by exception — the cataloger attends to the records the system flags, not the entire list one by one. The descriptive work arrives done; human attention concentrates where the system signals it is worth looking.
The system they run now
The records did not stay in a database just to be consulted. The school moved from a list that was read to a library that works, on Janium in the cloud (JaniumNet), with these modules:
- Online public access catalog (OPAC), accessible at
colsalle.janium.net, where students and teachers search by author, title or subject. - Circulation: loans, returns, reservations and fines, with user services. It is the piece a spreadsheet never gave: knowing who has each book and managing its return.
- Digital repository for images, text, audio and video, with full-text indexing and a zoom viewer.
- Authority control to keep names and subjects consistent, and physical inventory without stopping circulation.
For the library of a school of this size —two sections, around 2,800 titles—, the annual subscription to Janium in the cloud, with implementation, collection conversion and training included, comes in at the order of a couple thousand dollars a year. It is a reference for scale, not a rate: it depends on the modules and on each institution’s collection size.
What this case leaves us
Many small libraries keep their collection in a spreadsheet because setting up a proper system looks like a big project. The distance turned out to be short: the conversion with enrichment did the descriptive work, the review concentrated on what the system flagged, and in the end the school was left running a library that catalogs, circulates and publishes its catalog online, far from the spreadsheet it started with. For an institution of this size, that entry point is more accessible than is usually assumed.