24 April 2007 - Issue 5 |
Organisational update to better reflect customers' needs, globally and locally
In the past few weeks, both OCLC and OCLC PICA have taken a number of strategic steps to structure the organisations in a way that will enable us to deliver a single enterprise-wide product portfolio. These steps are designed to achieve global integration of OCLC and OCLC PICA services extending our organisations' capacity to act on existing and new product initiatives.
One of the main effects of the reorganisation is that OCLC's structure and that of OCLC PICA have been aligned globally to achieve a closer functional fit, in addition to having a regional market structure. Rein van Charldorp, Managing Director of OCLC PICA says: "The changes give us an ability to closely serve our customers and yet bring them all the benefits of cooperating on a large scale. They also enable the OCLC PICA organisation to work more closely with the Office of Research whose work benefits the international library community." To reflect this global realignment, Robin Murray has been appointed Vice President, Global Product Management for OCLC and all related companies. With Robin Murray and Rein van Charldorp, OCLC PICA now have two representatives in OCLC's Leadership team, supporting the alignment desire of both organisations. Robin will also remain an active member of the OCLC PICA Board of Directors. The global product management group, headed by Robin, will be tasked with integrating product planning activities across the organisation to ensure that an enterprise-wide product strategy emerges that offers a coordinated response to the needs of our customers at a regional and global level. The strategy will also allow the technology teams to align their engineering activity and drive far greater efficiencies through the shared development of application components across all product lines. These structural changes have been supplemented by further clarification of the regional focus that OCLC PICA has. OCLC PICA's distribution arrangement for OCLC products and services, will include northern Africa and the Middle East, giving OCLC PICA responsibility for the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East & Africa). This is in addition to its development and sales activities with regards to OCLC PICA products and services on a global scale. Earlier this month, a new holding company OCLC PICA Group B.V. has been established above the local legal entities. More details about this primarily legal change can be found here.
Karen Calhoun appointedKaren Calhoun, Senior Associate University Librarian for Information Technology and Technical Services at Cornell University Library, will join OCLC's leadership team as Vice President, OCLC WorldCat and Metadata Services, in May.
Dutch
Public Libraries launch national
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A library customer that cannot find what he or she wants in the catalogue of their own library is referred to other catalogues at a regional, provincial or national level. If the desired item is available elsewhere, it can be requested via zoek&boek.
Paula Braun, VOB service manager and responsible for the roll-out of zoek&boek says, "In December 2006, the province of Limburg was the first to start with zoek&boek. Since then, more provinces have been connected and the users have responded very positively to the new system. In the second half of January alone, in Flevoland no less than 577 requests were made, without the service being promoted." The intention is that all public libraries will be connected by the end of 2007.
OLIB User Group Meeting in March
On 27th March the UK OLIB user community convened their Spring meeting at Unilever in Bedfordshire. Notable outputs from the meeting included discussions about the newly reworked customer website. Plans for a significant overhaul of the existing site were also revealed and feedback was very positive.
George Bingham, OLIB's product manager, also gave a brief online demonstration of Ronin. Ronin is the project name for the development of a browser-based application offering an alternative interface to the WorldView client available in OLIB.
The customer site, Ronin and much more will be on the agenda again at the annual OLIB user conference which will take place on 10th and 11th July in Sheffield.
RLG Services Transition Update
In June 2006, the RLG membership overwhelmingly approved the agreement to combine with OCLC, the task of integrating services became a top priority. Here is a progress report.
Technical Services. OCLC Connexion now features RLIN21 online cataloguing functionality for searching authority history and for guided entry for archival control fields, as well as additional non-roman support and authority searching for the Z39.50 service. OCLC staff began loading RLG catalogue records into WorldCat in December 2006 and this was completed in March 2007. Support for institutional records (record clustering) is coming in May 2007. By July 2007, the RLG Union Catalogue will be completely merged with WorldCat.
Discovery Services. During the summer of 2007, 12 of the 17 RLG Eureka databases will be migrated to OCLC FirstSearch. Prior to the move to FirstSearch, these databases are available for purchase on the Eureka platform as part of a special promotion to new subscribers. Those to be discontinued: English Short Title Catalogue, Handbook of Latin American Studies, Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, Inside Information Plus and Index to Hispanic Legislation. The Hand Press Book Database and SCIPIO: Art and Rare Book Sales Catalogues will be integrated into WorldCat and searchable via FirstSearch as well as Connexion for updating by cataloguers.
Resource Sharing. Users of ILL Manager will migrate to an OCLC or OCLC PICA resource sharing service by September 2007. To help users migrate, OCLC will archive requests from ILL Manager into a central database in June 2007 from which users can search, display and export. The RLG SHARES Program is continuing and efforts are underway to expand the number of participants.
Service Moves. RLG's ArchiveGrid is now hosted in the OCLC Data Centre. The CAMIO service has moved to the OCLC CONTENTdm platform. Citation formatting features based on RLG's RedLightGreen, which ended in November 2006, have been added to WorldCat.org in 2007.
After the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, many projects were started to help the victims build up their homes and lives again. Among others, OCLC PICA supported a project for construction of houses in Sri Lanka - coincidentally called Pikaspon. Recently, we received this picture of “House no. 28” in the village of Baddegama, that carries a plaque to the effect it was sponsored by us. We wish for this family to have a safe and prosperous life in its new home.
OCLC
PICA extends resource sharing
in Canada
The Chinook Arch Regional Library System has purchased VDX, the resource sharing solution from OCLC PICA, on behalf of Alberta Public Libraries. Chinook Arch is a forward looking regional system in the Province of Alberta and also manages interlibrary loan services to other regions throughout the Province of Alberta, totaling 310 public libraries. The deal makes OCLC PICA one of the largest providers of ILL service in Canada.
VDX will provide the consortium with a streamlined search and request process that will increase the speed with which staff can satisfy requests. It was this strength plus the overall robustness of the product that most influenced the final decision.
"It was important that our chosen supplier had an excellent understanding of resource sharing, of consortia and of Canadian libraries. Chinook Arch is the fourth major consortium in Canada to choose VDX for the delivery of standards-based resource sharing, we clearly acknowledged the wisdom of so many other Canadian libraries when making our choice" says Anna Linville, Assistant Director for The Chinook Arch Regional Library System.
VDX has been widely adopted by national and academic organisations across Canada including Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, the Information Network for Ontario (INFO), the Conference of Rectors and Principals of Québec Universities (CREPUQ) and the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL).
British Health Libraries raise holdings visibility with OLIB
Seventeen NHS Trusts in Greater Manchester have gone live with a specifically tailored version of OLIB from OCLC PICA. The Greater Manchester Health Libraries Combined Catalogue is a hosted service that provides access to the holdings of 28 NHS libraries via OLIB's WebView OPAC.
The NHS libraries, keen to maintain their local library management systems yet offer a single OPAC facility, selected a solution that harvests locally held data and makes it available to end users as a single catalogue. "We knew that we wanted to offer a shared catalogue yet didn't want the upheaval of migrating to a new LMS. When OCLC PICA provided a tender response we were pleased to discover that OLIB could be tailored to meet our requirements", commented Jean Williams, Greater Manchester Health Libraries OPAC project leader.
OLIB is widely used in the NHS with a number of libraries and library consortia using the system as a full library management system. OCLC PICA has a wealth of experience in developing virtual and physical union catalogue solutions using products and services from their portfolio such as ZPORTAL, CBS and WorldCat. "Initially we thought that a virtual catalogue option would be the best solution, but following detailed discussion with the health librarians at Greater Manchester it became clear that a tailored OLIB system would offer the closest functional fit", said Graeme Miller, Head of UK Sales.
OCLC PICA is hosting the catalogue on behalf of the NHS, at their managed service centre in Leeds. Bibliographic and holdings data is imported into the central OLIB database from each of the individual library systems to provide up-to-date catalogue information to health professionals across the region.
OCLC launches WorldCat Registry
OCLC has launched the WorldCat Registry in North America, a comprehensive directory for libraries and consortia, and the services they provide. The WorldCat Registry will help libraries and consortia manage and share data that define their organisations - such as institution type, location, URLs for electronic services, circulation statistics, and population served - through a single, authoritative Web platform. Work is underway to incorporate international location data.
Profile data in the WorldCat Registry can include details such as branch library locations that can be used as part of WorldCat.org, the Web service that allows free access to WorldCat for finding materials held in libraries, enabling searchers to find what they need at the nearest library.
"The Registry was created to help libraries and other cultural heritage institutions make themselves more visible on the Web, and to ease libraries' administrative burdens associated with providing the same types of information to many sources" said Chip Nilges, Vice President, OCLC New Services. "Using data from the WorldCat Registry, WorldCat.org will expand its location listings and make it possible for Web searchers to locate, with greater accuracy, the library nearest them."
The Registry also helps solve an increasingly common administrative burden for libraries and library groups: keeping multiple institutional identities up to date across different internal and third-party applications and through a variety of methods, including Web interfaces, faxed paper forms and phone calls.
Visit the WorldCat Registry at: http://worldcat.org/registry/institutions
Online Helpdesk rolled out across Europe
As part of our commitment to improving customer services, we have upgraded our Incident Management System. Now there is a single online interface for all OCLC PICA products and regions, which means you can track all your incidents (support calls) in one place, and we can more easily coordinate responses to the underlying causes of incidents. Helpdesk Online is available 24/7, so you can log an incident at any time, and receive a Helpdesk Reference Number straightaway.
From end January 2007, customers supported by the Netherlands and German Service Desks migrated to an updated 'look and feel' for Helpdesk Online as we uprated the service. And on 2nd April, as planned, the Service Desks in UK, USA, and Australia/New Zealand went live with the new system.
To obtain a user account for Helpdesk Online please mail the Service Desk at support@oclcpica.org. Full user documentation is available at the Helpdesk Online site. Arrangements for contacting the Service Desk by phone, fax, or e-mail are entirely unaffected by the introduction of the new system.
ELiDOC to supply Greek libraries
with VDX
OCLC PICA has signed an agreement with ELiDOC in Athens, to supply the Hellenic Academic Libraries (HEAL) with OCLC PICA's interlibrary loan solution VDX.
The main reasons for HEAL choosing VDX are, its state-of-the-art technology, its compatibility with all possible standards, its flexibility to deal with different implementation environments, its upgradeability and the support and training that ELiDOC can deliver.
ELiDOC is no stranger to OCLC PICA, the company has been a distributor for OCLC products in Greece for a number of years.
New look for UnityUK
On 2nd April 2007 The Combined Regions (TCR), in partnership with OCLC PICA, went live with the new version of the UnityUK resource sharing service.
The new version delivers significant enhancements in workflow and usability and has been developed in partnership with the service's user community of over 120 libraries.
The new features have been designed to further enhance the system in line with the needs of its users. It has been developed in response to comments and suggestions gathered from numerous discussions, workshops, user groups and surveys with the user community during the 12 months since the service went live, and also from the outcome of the LinkUK integration project.
The new developments are designed to deliver significant enhancements in two key areas. First, the workflow through the requesting process has been simplified which will make the service easier and quicker to use. Second, the introduction of a new facility that enables UnityUK members and non UnityUK libraries to manage responses through the service. This new features removes the need for individual email responses to be updated manually.
OCLC PICA, in conjunction with the UnityUK user community, is planning further new developments for release later in 2007. Ideas currently under discussion include the integration of fee management in to the service and an end-to-end improvement in the interface and workflow with the British Library.
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