About the 5 Systems Resource Sharing Catalog

The 5 Systems site was developed by the School Library System of the Genesee Valley Educational Partnership in 2010 in collaboration with the other four School Library Systems of the greater Rochester area and the Rochester Regional Library Council. Local development and open source software allowed our five systems to meet state mandates for a regional catalog to support resource sharing while also lowering costs.

On the technical side, the site uses Drupal, an open source content management framework running on a Ubuntu Linux server with Apache, MYSQL and PHP. Search and indexing are handled by the Sphinx search engine and book covers come from Open Library.

The member libraries whose holdings are included here, use several different library management systems. Records are exported regularly and are added to this catalog using the Drupal MARC module, which has been developed largely with this website in mind. This module will continue to be improved and maintained as an ongoing part of this service.

To make the millions of books in the catalog more accessible, they have been grouped together so that multiple printings or editions (large print, hardcover, paperback, etc.) of the same title will usually appear as a single search result. The title grouping is not perfect, but we are believers in the FRBR concept and will continue to strive to increase accuracy while making the search results more usable.

The custom theme for the site was developed by Wendy Clark.