Orbis Cascade Alliance and WorldCat Navigator Kyle Banerjee Digital Services Program Manager October 9, 2009 NISO Forum

Orbis Cascade Alliance 36 institutions in Oregon & Washington Private & Public, 2-year & 4-year Colleges, Universities, Community colleges Members serving 600 – 42,000 students (FTE)

Major Programs Electronic Resources 62 libraries in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Hawaii Databases, ejournals, ebooks, etc. Northwest Digital Archives 31 libraries and archives in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska EAD finding aids, union database, digital content Summit Resource Sharing System 36 academic institutions in Oregon and Washington 9.2 million unique titles, 28.7 million items WorldCat Navigator INN-Reach All members use III Integrated Library System

Major Programs Conferences & Workshops ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication Code4Lib Northwest Cooperative Collection Development YBP agreement Distributed Print Repository Courier Service 280 libraries served through 80 dropsites in Oregon, Washington, & Idaho 400,000 packages per year Digital Services Digital collections, institutional repositories, etc.

Summit Fulfillments: FY03-08

What do we care about? Service Training Satisfaction

How do we get those things? Global Regional Local Work at the highest appropriate level

How do we get those things? (cont) Identify common operations and redundancies Leverage existing data (e.g. barcodes already on the piece) and systems (e.g. authentication mechanisms) Standardize on well designed tools and processes (e.g. paging slips, physical processing, etc) Simplify, streamline, and automate repetitive tasks Avoid manual processes such as searching, keying information, or transcription wherever possible

What is WorldCat Navigator? A hosted resource sharing platform (not an ILS) Discovery experience based on WorldCat Group (a multi library version of WorldCat Local) Delivery based on Navigator Request Engine (NRE) Circulation functions (paging, most alerting, billing, check in/out) currently handled by local ILS

What makes Navigator special? Consortial borrowing support – Much greater efficiency (42% better on lending side) – Based on trust and shared information – Requests based on real time availability – Interfaces with existing ILS – Load balancing Patrons make local, consortial and ILL requests using a single process Circulation Gateway allows NRE to talk to your local ILS when standards based protocols are not supported Hosted at OCLC

WorldCat Local Individual library catalog based on Worldcat.org discovery interface

WorldCat Group WorldCat Local instance that contains holdings of multiple libraries

Navigator Request Engine Staff interface with resource sharing functionality

Motivations for the migration A better patron experience More things that patrons need are not physically in the library, so improved discovery is needed Patron shouldnt need to know where something is before searching for it or ordering it. A patron who needs two books should use the same mechanism to request both One set of credentials gets you everything Strategic benefits Move towards network level services and reduction of redundant systems and workflows Standards based solution essential for long term viability and bringing disparate services together Leadership opportunity Partnership with OCLC

Timeline March 21, 2008 Board decision to work with OCLC to develop Navigator Implementation Team and workgroups formed October 15 WorldCat Navigator delivered November Work out bugs, get trainers and staff up to speed December 1 Showtime!

How we spent our time Holdings reclamation WorldCat Local and Navigator depend on accurate holdings data Configuration In NRE: Request managing locations, shelf and pickup locations, notices, institutional patrons, paging slips, holds, etc Hundreds, possibly thousands of parameters At local sites (varies with ILS): network connectivity, indexing, reclamation, accounts, holds, paging slips, firewall, load tables, templates

How we spent our time (continued) Training/Communication Hundreds of staff affected Circ/ILL reconfiguration Faculty and patrons need to be informed Managing the jitters Developing components Resolver ILL Resolver Batch paging slips

The Resolver resolver

Paging slip

Consortial workflow and fairness is important Load balancing ensures all institutions benefit/contribute Before automated load balancing, only 11% institutions have received/shipped ratio between 0.9 and 1.1. Huge disparities. Worst ratio is 9.1 After using automatic load balancing for two months 86% of membership has shipped/received ratio between 0.9 and 1.1 About 3/5 of libraries have ratio between 0.95 and 1.05 Worst ratio is 1.1 (11 items received for every 10 lent) Expect rates to improve with time

Navigator resource sharing at a glance Works!Needs improvement Patron experience Discovery of Summit & WorldCat materials Integrate local, consortial, ILL borrowing Redirection of ILL and OpenURL requests Local electronic holdings Edition selection needs to be more intelligent Staff experience Place holds Load balancing Paging Autocreate temp bibs and items Barcode tracking OpenURL in alerts More elegant pick up anywhere and visiting patron functionality Renewals

Side effects vary by institution Consortial borrowing is down ILL is up, particularly for nonreturnables. Some institutions report increased use of electronic resources. Staff workload manageable at all sites Fulfillment rates down. Consortia wide since going live is 82%. Worst institution is 75%. Fulfillment times are up Relatively few complaints

What lies ahead? The network ILS Do we really need to search, download, and catalog the same record 36 times? Should authority control, serials publication patterns, vendor data, etc really be that different at different institutions? Network circ allows easy formation of arbitrary groups Shared catalog Best level to deliver service may be at consortial rather than global level Resource sharing requires compatibility Standardization at service and protocol level Must play well in mixed environments

Transforming good ideas into reality Make it work, make it fast, make it slick (in that order) Dont get distracted by the small stuff Buy in is critical Communication is key for having people take ownership of the process Understanding pain points is essential to maintaining credibility with front line workers Find ways to productively engage people Progress requires upsetting the status quo Collaborative efforts cause discomfort and local change Doing things halfway to appease those raise concerns can make the pain far worse…

Questions? Kyle Banerjee Digital Services Program Manager October 9, 2009 NISO Forum