Recently we have begun to move our card catalog into an online catalog. We evaluated many online systems and eventually decided upon CyberTools for Libraries. They offered an online web catalog, and easy cataloging component, and an integrated serials module for a very reasonable price. One of the main factors for choosing CyberTools was their integrated serials module. Many companies that were in our price range did not have an integrated serials module or had one that we felt wasn't as flexible or as powerful as the CyberTools product.

So far I have been using the product without any official training and I have developed some first impressions.

CyberTools Support is AWESOME!
I can't tell you how many products that I end up waiting days/weeks for an answer to a simple problem. Some companies (journal publishers especially) don't even seem to answer their help desk email.

We were encouraged to test and play with the product before our training so that we could get to know the product better. That is what I did. I followed their Getting Started Manual and consulted their vast amounts of help pages on their site. For the most part I could understand and follow their documentation. The couple of times was confused or could not find my answer I would email their support and I would get a response usually within the next couple of hours and always within the same day. They were very patient with me and helped me through a few areas I was having problems with.

One thing I would like to see is a search box for their documentation pages. You remember reading about something in the Getting Started Manual but when you encounter the problem you can't remember where within that manual you read it. A simple search that would direct you to the help page would make the already strong documentation that much easier to navigate.

Over all use:
I like this product. As with all systems there is a learning curve. With the help of support, their documentation, and some slow hours at the library, I have begun to feel fairly confident using the system. By all rights I have not done much, I have just been working on our journals so that they are set up correctly within the serials module, and I have cataloged a few books (I am not a cataloger, so I was happy to download the records from NLM and import them into my system).

However, there are a few things I would like to see in their product that I think would make the product easier to use and navigate overall. These are picky things, I would not dump this product based on these things, I just think they would make the product that much more slick.

Small working window. I am still trying to get used to the small yellow window which the product is displayed in. You can not really enlarge the window and if you move the window to the right of your desktop, as soon as you hit a button and it moves to another window which is then placed at the top left of your screen.
In a world where we are getting larger and larger monitors and where people might want to operate multiple windows to see two products at the same time this type of display is a little annoying.

These are just some of my thoughts. I would like to put down more but alas I have run out of time because I have to get to training. I will keep you updated on my thoughts about CyberTools and the pros and cons to using it. My hope is that somebody interested in the product will stumble along my little blog and get a better understanding of this system from a librarian who is using the product. I know when I was searching for an ILS system I had wished there was somebody who wrote about the positives and the negatives of each product I was interested in.