“Next Generation” Catalogs Kyle Banerjee Orbis Cascade Alliance

Goals of our project Provide access to the next generation of library services Allow management of diverse collections as a single unified collection Seamless integration of products maintained by many vendors and data providers Improved discovery experience for our patrons  Retain critical functionality provided by our current systems

Major considerations What are the true costs of implementation, hardware, migration, maintenance, and licensing? What knowledge is required to set up and maintain services? Who will make things happen? What will we realistically do? What compromises do systems make to deliver their functionality?

Approaches we considered Encore (“next generation” offering by current vendor) Evergreen Aquabrowser Primo Endeca WorldCat Local Locally developed

All solutions required compromises that are not always obvious at first glance Significant lag time Missing facets Excessive server load / only useful in low demand environments No access to local data Very limited advanced search capabilities Disappointing ability to deal with distributed collections …. and more ….

Our initial conclusions…… (as of November 2007) The market is still immature Existing products are expensive to implement in terms of time and money In the short term, it would be just as easy and much cheaper to develop a limited solution ourselves

Alliance developed ($5,000 server + 40 hrs staff time) 9 million bibs, all items stored in memory

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Dwight D. Eisenhower

Drastic and unexpected changes in our environment… Contract for existing system becomes unaffordable Need revised workflows and different technology for new resource sharing system Desire among membership to go in a fundamentally new direction

A new game plan Development partnership with OCLC Data harvesting for original catalog repurposed to establish availability service Other staff resources diverted to plan a major transition and develop infrastructure to support a different system

Next steps Help develop “OCLC consortial borrowing solution” Implement group catalog on the WorldCat.org platform Implement VDX for resource sharing Work with OCLC to create a “circulation gateway” that integrates VDX with local circ systems

What we’re working on now Using a shared system to provide contextual access to resources Getting data in/out of our systems Making it easy for patrons to request items and place holds Developing workflows and tools that will allow staff to function at a high level