WorldCat Local

For some time, Kelly Vickery, Tari Keller and I have been following the development of OCLC’s WorldCat Local service. At the recent ALA midwinter meeting, I learned that OCLC would be making a special offer to the SAALCK Libraries to participate in a demo/pilot of the service. The SAALCK Directors and their IT folks participated in a webinar last week to consider the opportunity and have decided to proceed with a trial this spring. At the end of the demo, we would want to make a decision about whether to purchase the product.

So what is WorldCat Local? An extensive description can be found at http://www.oclc.org/worldcatlocal/default.htm . I have extracted a few sentences of explanation:

“WorldCat Local is a unique service that works in conjunction with WorldCat.org and provides Web access to WorldCat—the world’s richest database for discovery of materials held in libraries.
WorldCat Local gives your library users a Web-scale experience with each and every search, and provides Web visibility for your library on a far-greater level than you could achieve on your own. Powerful social networking tools also let users share opinions and expertise with online peers. And because WorldCat Local operates on a network level, your library immediately benefits from all future updates and improvements made to the service at no extra charge.
WorldCat Local interoperates with existing locally maintained services like circulation, resource sharing, full text and local digital collections to create a simplified search, discovery and delivery experience for your users.”

Features of the system can be found here: http://www.oclc.org/worldcatlocal/features/default.htm

You can also experience an implementation of the interface at the University of Washington and at Ohio State University.
· http://www.lib.washington.edu/
· http://library.osu.edu/
WorldCat Local would have a number of advantages for us

• A web like interface which places UK owned resources at the top of the list but includes all of the records of WorldCat
• An easy way for users to initiate ILL requests from the catalog for materials not owned by UK
• 54 million articles have been added to the database and that number is growing
• Harvesting of digital assets in the same search
• A one stop search experience similar to MetaLib will be added by the end of the year without the additional expense of that software
• Very similar costs to what we are already spending on a variety of services

What happens next? Kelly and the Encore Development Working Group are going to take on this project and are already hard at work on the remaining decisions to be made for our implementation. Then a demo of the product will be made available for review and feedback. You’ll hear more from Kelly and the Working Group once a timeline has been completed.