Hosting Heritage Cirqa services for Professional Libraries

Professional libraries take many forms, but whether your library is a resource hub for a company or a busy hospital library, your local IT support almost certainly have other business-critical priorities. In our experience most IT departments prefer to outsource the hosting of specialist software such as Heritage Cirqa, leaving the day to day maintenance of the system, backups, upgrades and patches to system suppliers. Library staff will have direct access to our expert team whenever they need help, confident they will always be our priority. In any professional library staff time is incredibly valuable, and less time waiting on local IT resources means more time to assist library users with resource discovery.

Leave the maintenance of the system to us and free up valuable time so you can concentrate on enhancing your service and looking after the needs of your users.

Here are some features and benefits of a hosted system:

• Heritage Cirqa is installed on its own, dedicated, virtual server by our team of experts. So no competing for memory or space with other systems, which helps ensure consistent performance.

• We guarantee 99% server uptime and a maximum of 3 working hours of unscheduled downtime per year. That will almost certainly represent far less downtime than running on an institutional system.

• Hosted systems are supported by a sophisticated backup facility, including off-site backup, 256 AES encryption and automated failure notification. You don’t need to worry whether a backup has run properly again, nor even to remember it needs to happen! Rest easy that multiple backups can be referenced should they be required.

• Hosted systems are continuously monitored for issues, which are often identified and fixed before customers even know there is a problem. A problem spotted earlier causes less damage and avoids lengthy investigation and time fixing things.

• All patches and upgrades are applied at pre-arranged times convenient to you. These can happen out of hours or at a point in the diary when you have time to learn about and exploit the new features and functions it contains.

• Small fixes and configurations can be undertaken on request directly on your system without you needing to be present. Another reason why you can get on with the important parts of your job rather than administering a system.

• Your data is stored in a secure datacentre here in the UK, with a very high level of protection. Rest assured that this level of protection is probably higher than that which could be provided by your own institution.

A hosted Heritage Cirqa system is like having a dedicated Systems Librarian; an additional pair of technical eyes and hands and a trustworthy colleague to turn to at a fraction of the cost of a salary.