1. “Next Generation” Catalogs
Kyle Banerjee
Orbis Cascade Alliance

2. 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

3. 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?

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

5. 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 ….

6. 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

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

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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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