Sturgeon Bay (WI) School District migrates to Surpass for centralized library automation solution

With fiber optics in place, Sturgeon Bay School District was ready to centralize. When their current vendor quoted them $20,000 per school to upgrade and centralize the five-school district, technology coordinator Douglas Andrews started to research more economical solutions.

Doug installed a demo version of Surpass on the server for the librarians to examine. “They liked it right from the beginning,” Doug reports. “I think the ease of use and intuitive interface of the system make it desirable.”

One librarian spent a day at an Iowa library in similar-sized school district. “She talked at length with their librarian, who loved using Surpass,” the technology coordinator recalled. “After that it was a done deal.”

Surpass was the ideal solution for both the librarians and the technology coordinator. The librarians enjoy the easy-to-use and intuitive interface of Surpass. They appreciate improved performance, reporting and management tools. The centralized catalog has even helped them with acquisitions, enabling them to more efficiently choose materials with shared state funds.

Doug was pleased with the cost and stability of the system. “Network administration is my biggest concern,” Doug said. As technology coordinator, he desires a stable database, smooth back-ups, and minimal database repair. He reported with satisfaction that Surpass has been excellent in all of these important areas.

Thanks to the centralized solution from Surpass, the Sturgeon Bay school district moved smoothly through two significant transitions. First one library closed, dispersing its collection throughout the district’s other four libraries. “With everything in a common database, it was no problem,” Doug said. “We just changed the location codes for individual copies.”

Then the high school migrated from a competitor’s DOS product to the Windows based, centralized environment of Surpass. Even multiple duplicate titles didn’t hamper the transition. The powerful import routines in Surpass made the merge simply, by automatically finding matches and adding a local holdings copy for the location being merged. “I haven’t been through a conversion like this that easily in quite a while,” Doug reported.

“Surpass is a great package,” Doug declared. “The price is right, the product works well and the support works well. We don’t have anything to complain about!”