I arrived in 2004 the original 1997 installation of Heritage was still running, though no maintenance routines, upgrades or so had ever been carried out...!). Although this is a postgrad and research library its staffing is the lowest of all UCL libraries, and its funding per student significantly below UCL average.

As you may remember I would have preferred under the special circumstances here at the Eastman (one librarian, one IT person, two p/t library assistants for 1,000 readers) not to have to run my own LMS, and rather join a consortium. [...], UCL's main system, was unsuitable - too
inflexible; [...] which two comparable libraries share would have been a good solution,but the [...] faction got the Vice Provost to disallow us to join that... So we were 'stuck' with the local Heritage set-up, but I don't regret it because, jointly with your engineers and trainers, we have made it a real success, and have in some respects a more modern and efficient system now than UCL's clumsy [...] is.

First of all, your engineers helped us update, upgrade and implement all the modules we wanted - half the ones my predecessor bought in 1997 had never been installed. We have since automated many procedures, such as Acquisitions and Serials. We asked you if NLM records could be made available through QuickCat, and you achieved this within weeks - another enormous benefit for us as it allows us to download quality records with the right classmarks and subject headings. We wanted a self-issue machine, and although writing the SIP connectivity did take longer than planned it works fine now, and my UCL colleagues look at the machine with envy .... We feel we are getting as much out of our LMS as we could wish for. The greatest advantage of Heritage, however, is the responsiveness of the support team and engineers.

From my colleagues at the other UCL libraries I keep hearing about all the things [...] can't do; and when I then tell them that we just raise these issues with IS Oxford, and that you always find a soltion, they look at me in disbelief... I don't know what  system I'll be running at RLHH, and sharing one with another library would probably be my best option, but I am grateful for the excellent cooperation I have enjoyed with IS Oxford over the last three years, and with you and your team all the best for the future! Do pass my thanks on to those team members who have done a lot of work for us - [...], [...], [...], [...]...