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It is with great pleasure that we issue
this first edition of the new OCLC PICA Newsletter. This marks a
new phase in the development of our organisation.
As you know, the past months
have seen a number of changes following the acquisition of Sisis
and FDI by OCLC PICA in 2005. First our back office operations were
streamlined, then all the company names were changed into OCLC PICA.
During this period we have worked hard at restructuring the organisation
to take advantage of our new scale. This process has now been finalised
and that is why I think that for once it is not too much to speak
of a “new” OCLC PICA. I believe the company is now stronger
than ever, with more links into the information community and better
able to fulfil the future needs of our customers.
I hope you will enjoy reading
this and future issues of the OCLC PICA Newsletter.
Rein van Charldorp
Managing Director, OCLC
PICA
New
organisational structure and
Board of Directors
The new organisational
structure of OCLC PICA was planned to optimise the additional resources
that are available since the joining of Sisis and FDI in 2005. In
addition to the administrative and other staff departments, there
are four divisions to serve you: Sales, Strategy & Marketing,
Technology, and Operations & Services.
With the new structure
comes a new Board of Directors: (back row, left to right)
Mark Carden (Director of Sales), Robin Murray (Director of Strategy
& Marketing), Norbert Weinberger (Director of Technology) and
Dorien Hooman (Corporate Secretary). (Front row) Rob Stricker
(Director of Finance) and, apart from being Managing Director, Rein
van Charldorp will act as the Director
of Operations & Services (OPS) ad interim.
The divisions will work
closely together with each other as well as with you, in order to
develop more state-of-art solutions that help your users easily
and quickly find the information they need.
NetLibrary
eBooks for Bavarian State Library
OCLC PICA will provide
NetLibrary eBooks to Bavarian State Library, under an agreement
for an initial purchase of 1,000 titles. The purchase is part of
a plan by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Germany's research
funding organization, to improve access to electronic content throughout
the country.
UnityUK
growing fast
In excess of 100 library
authorities have already signed up to become members of UnityUK:
the next generation resource sharing and interlibrary loan service
from The Combined Regions (TCR). In the four months since the launch,
90% of members have been trained, and seven regional user groups
have been scheduled. More than 50% of subscribers have already used
the service to place a request.
County Councils, Metropolitan
Boroughs and Unitary authorities are all represented among the UnityUK
membership list and library authorities large and small have all
signed up for the new TCR service. The geographic spread of UnityUK
users is impressive and the service is already being used by libraries
across England, Scotland and Wales.
As part of the ongoing
development of the service, from mid July 2006 UnityUK subscribers
will be able to access the former UnityWeb catalogue, complete with
40 million holdings, and use the information for searching and placing
requests.
UnityUK will, for the
first time, deliver a national network for resource sharing for
the UK as it brings together the union catalogues of The Combined
Regions and LinkUK and one integrated service is expected in mid
2007. OCLC PICA is hosting and managing the new service which uses
our latest resource sharing technology.
The 78 LinkUK libraries
also use OCLC PICA software to share resources and the integration
project between UnityUK and the LinkUK libraries is due to start
during the summer 2006. Early adopters among the LinkUK libraries
will use both services as part the integration project to ensure
that the UnityUK service is developed in line with the LinkUK libraries
requirements.
More than 175 library
authorities across the UK use OCLC PICA software to share resources
and manage requesting.
For more information on
UnityUK and The Combined Regions visit www.combinedregions.com.
OLIB
7.6.0 released
Mid July saw the launch of the latest release of OLIB, version 7.6.0. As well as several
smaller product enrichments, this release brings many major
enhancements, including a much-improved and configurable WebView
title hitlist display, reporting in WorldView, and a complete overhaul
of the Reservations and Recalls facility in the Circulation module.
OLIB 7.6.0 is also the first OLIB release to run on Oracle 10g and
on Linux.
Five customers in the UK have already upgraded, and many others
both in the UK and the Netherlands are scheduled to upgrade in the
coming months.
LBS
Update
LBS3
state of affairs
The most recent LBS3 version was version 3.8.8.0, which
includes adaptations to the latest IBW version and ISBN-13. In
July, version 3.8.8.1 became available, which focuses mainly on
a number of corrections for EDIFACT.
New LBS4 versions
This July, the latest release of LBS4 was launched, version
2.6.3. It includes the last results of the quality enhancement programme
that was started in 2005. The majority of problems reported by libraries
have been fixed in this version. In addition, a number of requests
were realised, among which extensive flexible printing facilities
and faster execution of bulk operations in the lending module.
CBS
version 3.1 implemented
End of June, a new CBS version 3.1 was implemented
in the Netherlands; the CBS software is used for the Dutch central
catalogue, the ILL service and the user administration. Apart from
additional functions and improvements, it also forms the basis for
using Unicode in the Dutch central catalogue.
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Open
WorldCat international,
Bavarian State Library also participating
After a successful launch
in the USA, Open WorldCat has gone international. The Find in
a Library interface is now available in five languages, buying
options have been added for extra value and postal code information
makes it possible to find the nearest library location for the title
in a search result. Open WorldCat makes authoritative information
visible and accessible on the open Web. The Bavarian State Library
has also decided to load its data into WorldCat and benefit from
those advantages.
In addition to English,
the Find in a Library interface is now available in French,
Dutch,
German
and Spanish,
making all its features more immediate and meaningful to users for
whom these languages are the natural choice.
For the United Kingdom,
Germany and the Netherlands, post code information has been added.
Users in those countries can now easily enter their location and
identify the closest library with the item of interest to them.
This will lead to increased use of library collections and services
through circulation, interlending and enquiries, as experience has
shown.
The addition of the Amazon.com
buying option (or a regional version) for Web searchers in the UK
and Netherlands makes Open WorldCat an attractive alternative for
directly searching on book vendors’ sites, as now the user
will see an alternative to buying: borrowing from the library. More
online book vendors may be added in the near future.
The Open WorldCat programme
makes records of library-owned materials in the WorldCat
database available to Web users on popular Internet search
sites. Links to content in library collections—books,
serials, digital images and many other formats—appear alongside
links to traditional Web content. The result: participating libraries
are more visible on the Web, and their collections are more accessible
from the sites where many people start their search for information
– also those who don’t typically visit libraries.
The Bavarian State Library (BSB) in Munich
and OCLC PICA have agreed to exchange bibliographic records and
holding information. This will be done by loading BSB bibliographic
data into OCLC’s WorldCat, which will make them available
through WorldCat Discovery and the Open WorldCat programme. BSB
librarians and users will also gain access to all other records
in WorldCat.
The BSB is the second largest academic library in German-speaking
countries with a collection of just under 9 million books, 85,000
manuscripts and more than 44,000 printed and electronic journals.
More information on Open WorldCat can be found at www.oclc.org/worldcat/open.
OCLC
Members Council update
During the last OCLC
Members Council meeting, just before summer, the number of delegates
representing OCLC PICA has been extended to seven. The new elected
delegates are David Bradbury (City of London Guildhall Library,
UK), Ariëtte Skolnik (City Library of Haarlem, Netherlands)
and Poul Erlandsen (National Library of Education, Denmark). Berndt
Dugall (University Library Frankfurt, Germany) was elected to the
position of Delegate at Large for the Executive Committee. Juha
Hakala (Helsinki University Library, Finland) and John Tsebe (National
Library of South Africa) will serve as alternate delegates. OCLC
PICA is very pleased with these appointments and congratulates all
six delegates.
There are 66 Members Council delegates who are elected by and represent the OCLC member libraries in their respective regions. The Council meets three times a year. These meetings, which are attended by OCLC management and members of the OCLC Board of Trustees, serve as a forum for exchanging ideas and raising issues. Other OCLC PICA delegates are Alex Klugkist, Ellen Tise and Colin Harris. Norma Read ended her term as alternate delegate. The new OCLC PICA delegates come from various areas in the library community.
Members Council delegates
are elected for three-year terms by the members of their respective
regions. Staff of regional service providers, as well as OCLC-member
libraries, may serve. Delegates come from many types and sizes of
institutions and thus bring different perspectives to the Council.
The number of delegates
from each region is based on that region's proportional contribution
to the WorldCat bibliographic database and number of OCLC-member
institutions. Delegates report back to OCLC members and participants
through regional service providers and other state and regional
associations.
City
of The Hague fine-tune search results
using OCLC PICA technology
The
City of The Hague is now live with a new, upgraded, version of CPORTAL,
the e-Government search engine from OCLC PICA.
Using CPORTAL
version 2.0, administrators can control the relevance ranking across
the whole of the results set: they can simultaneously specify a
preference for results from particular data sets, and achieve query
responses in less than half a second. This is irrespective of where
the information is held, even in a library catalogue. CPORTAL 2.0
has a further twist – each database searched can be calibrated
uniquely, so that the order of results can be fine-tuned. CPORTAL
is able to harvest and index both structured metadata and unstructured
full text from databases, websites, text documents and PDFs.
The City
of The Hague can now make information easier to find in their search
service for users of the www.denhaag.nl
website by adding relevant terms to their users’ queries,
which reduces the number of zero hits.
The City
of the Hague is the third-largest city in the Netherlands - nearly
2 million people visit the www.denhaag.nl site each year, and a
quarter of those use the search engine.
PSI
4.2: faster and improved
Early July, PSI version
4.2 was implemented, which is the OCLC PICA search engine used for
PiCarta and more end-user services. Recently, PSI has also been
selected as the preferred future search engine for the OCLC enterprise.
PSI 4.2 runs faster thanks to new hardware, yields quicker results
thanks to new functionalities and has an improved layout.
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