Germany Library Success Stories

Public Library of Hannover

Dutch version on process

The Hannover Public Library serves the larger Hannover district’s growing population of over a million people through 19 municipal branches. The Library has maintained a longstanding commitment to quality of service and ease of access for the entire community. It has also been at the forefront of the mission of an increasing number of public libraries, to offer services to non-residents in an effort to strengthen the library’s role as center for cultural and intellectual exchange in the community.

The City

In a city that holds some of the world’s largest trade fairs including 'Industrie' and 'Cebit', the city of Hannover plays host to millions of tourists, visitors and conferees every year. With its unique mix of new and ancient architecture, spanning more than two millennia, Hannover stands both as vessel of the past and a harbinger to the future. The City’s librarians are front-and-center in this role, serving as ambassadors to the city’s rich cultural, historic and literary legacy and as emissaries to the future of information technology. Over the last several years, as the library’s collection has grown (now at more than 1.2 million items), so too has the number of residents and visitors passing through its halls.

The challenge

In 1999, in anticipation of EXPO2000, Hannover’s World Exhibition, the city decided that it needed to bring its libraries up to speed with its hi-tech reputation. They wanted to take the opportunity of their EXPO, to renew and unite the IT systems of all of the City’s municipal libraries within a single, open, integrated network. In this pursuit, Hannover was looking for an international, multilingual library system vendor with a strong presence in Germany and extensive experience in handling the union of large municipal library consortia. With 19 library locations, varying in size from 20,000 items to over 650,000 items, they were looking for cutting edge technology that would help them succeed in their mission of improving access to digital information and enhancing Internet and computer literacy for all Hannover residents. In addition to these demands, Hannover faced a uniquely complex challenge. The city computer network administrators, managing some 8000 departmental PCs, needed to be able to take any of these computers on or off line at will, in rapid response to any malfunctions or viruses. However, in order to maintain this level of centralized control, all of the client PCs in the network needed to be configured in precisely the same way, without any local variations or proprietary software. Moreover, since none of the City’s data servers had dedicated administration staff to directly supervise them, they needed to run flawlessly around the clock, seven days a week. Of course, this included all of the computers in all of the city’s library branches. In a contest that drew bids from leading LMS providers across Europe and the US including Dynix, Sisis and Germany’s largest vendor, B.O.N.D., Hannover found the answer to their challenge with BiblioMondo. Here’s why:

The response

Key to BiblioMondo’s success in Hannover was the company’s ability to respond directly to the unique challenges that the city faced. Hannover already recognized BiblioMondo as leader in the industry, with a solid reputation of providing cutting-edge multilingual library technology to large high circulation libraries like theirs. “During the review process, we spoke with nearly a dozen BiblioMondo clients across Europe. ” said Herr Nietiedt, Hannover Public Library. “The company’s excellent reputation in managing large public library networks, along with their commitment to innovation and leadership in Web-centric technology made them the clear choice for our library and our community going into the future.” The Concerto™ platform provided Hannover with the perfect balance of network-friendly design and an intuitive Web browser-based front-end. Critical to the Hannover project, was the unique architecture of Concerto™ which allows all application software to be housed on local application servers within each of the City’s 19 libraries. This meant that all of the Hannover administration’s client PCs, including those of the library, could be configured in the same way allowing for stable central control. With the added challenge of a largely unsupervised network, Concerto™ provided facilities to keep it in constant operation without the need for manual intervention. These strengths, along with the openness of the Concerto™ platform, its robust, scalable tiered architecture and the independence of its hardware components made it the right fit for Hannover. By fall of 2000, Hannover had completed a smooth conversion to BiblioMondo’s Concerto™ system, running all of its major modules including OPAC, Circulation, Cataloging, Acquisitions along with a number of specialty pieces of existing hardware and software integration that made for a painless transition to their new system.

Hannover, the first European library aboard the ZONES™ network

Twice a year the Hannover Public Library goes before the City council to assess its performance and forge future initiatives to expand and improve services. In 2002, the Library presented its plans to renew its commitment to quality, and to implement a variety of new, technology-based services that would reinforce loyalty, strengthen patron demand and increase traffic through all of the City’s libraries. At the time the library was also facing cutbacks in funding for staff, which made the need for comprehensive self-service solution an absolute imperative within the larger mission of improving service. An established BiblioMondo client for several years, Hannover was among the first libraries to be introduced to Zones. Being early adopters, and maintaining a strong belief in BiblioMondo’s product innovations, they also became one of the first libraries in the BiblioMondo network to implement the product. The technology and the concepts behind Zones directly addressed the challenges the Hannover Library faced in improving service with limited resources. A comprehensive, patron-pleasing front-end library services solution, Zones provides Hannover with the tools they need to attract and retain new customers of all ages and interests. BiblioMondo is proud to be in partnership with the City of Hannover and join in welcoming visitors to explore the riches of the Hannover Public Library.