The New Clio System
The Clio System is a total ILL manangement system designed to provide all of the functionality that ILL departments and library patrons expect to have in today's networked world. While our ClioBasic provides the essential features for ILL staff to manage their business, the New Clio System includes online components to allow almost all interactions between ILL staff and patrons to take place on your library's website. By integrating the Clio System into your ILL office as well as your library's website, patrons are able to see the status of all of their ILL requests, pick up PDF versions of documents that were delivered via Ariel or Odyssey or scanned locally, place new requests and communicate with ILL staff. Printing out articles, mailing or otherwise delivering them, and answering phone calls or in-person queries about "where's my book?" can be almost eliminated. Your ILL staff will thank you!
ClioWeb is what we call the patron web interface piece of the Clio System. It is a web application based on Microsoft's ASP .NET framework (see the technical requirements section below for more details). ClioWeb is intended to be seamlessly blended into your library's website where it will supply all of the ILL-related features you might wish to provide for your patrons. In other words, your patrons won't know or see anything about Clio or ClioWeb, they'll just see that you have helpful, logical and easy to use ILL pages as part of your library's website. We have a demonstration ClioWeb site where you can see what a library patron at the mythical University of New Boston (Clio Software's home town) would see when visiting the library's website in search of answers to ILL-related questions.
Key Points
- The Clio System includes the staff-use applications Clio, ClioRequest and ClioEDelivery as well as the patron web interface component ClioWeb.
- There is a one-time fee for all customers wishing to upgrade from ClioBasic to the new Clio System. Annual service and support fees for Clio System customers are also slightly higher.
- ClioWeb is designed to use your campus or institution's existing authentication systems (LDAP or ActiveDirectory). If one of those options is available, patrons won't need to create and remember new login information or use a specific link or password for each document they want to access, they will simply provide "the usual" username and password. Once authenticated, patrons can then see what's going on with all of their ILL requests and pick up any PDF files they might have, all together in one place.
- ClioWeb deposits new ILL requests directly into ClioRequest's database for processing by ILL staff.
- The Clio System can provide unmediated forwarding of new requests to OCLC if desired.
- ClioWeb includes a staff interface that provides for complete control and customization of the website right from your web browser-- no fooling around with code required!
Technical Requirements
The latest version of ClioWeb is a Microsoft ASP.NET web application and must run on a Microsoft web server, 2003 or later, with IIS 6.0 or greater and ASP.NET 2.0. This can be a machine that already exists, as long as ClioWeb can have its own Virtual Directory. A Virtual Machine works just fine. ClioWeb itself takes up very little space on a web server, but customers using the site to deliver alot of PDF documents to their patrons (something like 20+ per day) can expect to have a maximum of few gigabytes of PDF files sitting on their server at any one time. ClioWeb is designed to communicate with LDAP or ActiveDirectory servers for patron authentication. If you'd like to learn more about installing ClioWeb, have a look at this page.
Earlier versions of ClioWeb were based on the ColdFusion web application system. Customers with a ColdFusion ClioWeb site are free to keep using it for as long as they like and Richard will continue to be available for support. Current ClioAdvanced customers are also free to transition to the new ASP version of ClioWeb if they wish; contact us for more information.