National
Library of Wales acquires
NetLibrary eBooks
The National Library
of Wales has supplemented its Welsh collection with 295 eBooks on
Welsh interests and culture from NetLibrary, enabling further remote
access to its resources for over 15,000 registered users.
Robert Lacey, acquisitions
librarian at the National Library's Department of Collection Services
says, “The National Library of Wales has the world's largest
collection of works about Wales and the other Celtic countries:
books and pamphlets, archives and manuscripts, magazines and newspapers,
paintings and photographs, microforms and ephemera. Also, as an
important general reference library, we are constantly seeking to
add to our electronic resources so that users from afar can access
information at any time of day or night and the new eBooks are an
excellent addition to our collection.”
NetLibrary,
available through OCLC PICA, is an established leader in eContent
delivery. As of January 2007, NetLibrary has 15,000 customers in
over 50 countries. NetLibrary acquires over 1500 new titles every
month and is currently offering 127,000 titles from over 450 publishers.
View
the full press release here.
Greater
Manchester NHS Trusts "open up" to OLIB
The challenge to provide
open access to the many resources held by NHS libraries has been
met in Greater Manchester by OLIB. January 2007 saw the launch of
a tailored solution by OCLC PICA, enabling 17 NHS Trusts in the
North West of England, to have their collections harvested and made
available for browsing and searching using OLIB's WebView software.
“Government and
Health Sector Libraries are seeing the importance of opening up
their collections to public view whilst working within existing
firewall restrictions” said Graeme Miller, Head of UK Sales.
“OCLC PICA's experience in this sector means we can offer
a range of options to provide wider access without compromising
security.”
Robin
Murray shares his vision of future library service
 Robin
Murray, Director of Strategy & Marketing at OCLC PICA has
been outlining a vision for future library service provision.
In January, he published
a white paper entitled Library Systems: Synthesise, Specialise,
Mobilise, in which he challenges the current state of library
systems and their fitness for purpose in managing the evolving requirements
of libraries. You can download a copy of the white
paper.
Discover
WorldCat.org
The new web portal
offers users a new way to reach the riches of the world's libraries
Today's users want the
universe of information – including library resources –
at their fingertips, as part of their Web experience. To help meet
this demand, OCLC is rolling out a new destination site with a downloadable
search box designed to elevate the visibility of library collections
and services on the Web. WorldCat.org
is a permanent web page dedicated solely to searching WorldCat libraries.
Students, researchers, librarians and other information seekers
can go to this site to search the WorldCat database or add the new
WorldCat search box, which will reside on WorldCat.org.
The new WorldCat.org web
site and search box will let more people discover the riches of
library-held materials catalogued in WorldCat by making the complete
database accessible for free on the open web. It complements
access that is now available to library collections through Open
WorldCat.
WorldCat.org
offers features designed to appeal to a new generation of web users
accustomed to instant access, lots of options and anything that
facilitates personalisation and redistribution. In particular, rich
evaluative content like publisher-provided item descriptions, author
biographies and websites, tables of content and content excerpts.
And enhancements are ongoing to improve the quality of the experience
for your users.
CONTENTdm
Update
CONTENTdm 4.2 is now available.
This latest version of CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management software
delivers enhancements to the user interface and significant new
features for documents, newspapers, letters and other text-based
items. With the new CONTENTdm release comes:
- Upgraded OCR capabilities;
- Further enhancements to the advanced search
function;
- Additional options for viewing documents;
This
latest release is free to all existing CONTENTdm customers.
CERL
Hand Press Book Database to be hosted by OCLC
The Consortium of European
Research Libraries has announced that OCLC will host the CERL Hand
Press Book Database, a collection of more than 2 million catalogue
records from libraries representing items of European printing from
the 15th century through the 1830s, the hand-press period, integrated
into one database.
 The
CERL Hand Press Book Database is a unique and steadily growing catalogue
of European printing in the early modern era – from c. 1455
to c. 1830. The resource integrates descriptive records for European
national, university and research library holdings. It is especially
valuable for research in intellectual history, social history, and
transmission of thought – as well as in the history of printing
and the history of the book.
The CERL Hand Press Book
Database had been hosted by RLG since 1994. In July 2006, RLG combined
with OCLC. Also see www.cerl.org.
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New
Director of Operations & Services: Eric van Lubeek
 Eric
van Lubeek will be joining OCLC PICA as the Director of Operations
& Services, starting as of March 1, 2007. Eric will become a
member of the OCLC PICA Board of Directors.
Eric van Lubeek brings
with him twenty years of experience in the library and information
field which he acquired while working in consulting, sales and management
positions. Eric comes from Infor Libraries Division (formerly known
as Geac) where he was Managing Director. In addition, Eric gained
international experience when managing companies in the Benelux,
France, UK, Canada and the USA.
Eric is looking forward
to his new position at OCLC PICA. “The information and
library world has always fascinated me,” says Eric van Lubeek,
“and I am keen to employ my knowledge and experience in an
organisation that has proven to play an important role in it.”
MFA
Digital Library launches in Spring
with OLIB
The Ministry of
Foreign Affairs in The Hague, Netherlands is due to go live with
the first phase of its Digital Library in Spring 2007. The overall
project will utilise a range of OCLC PICA services, starting with
the implementation of OLIB7.
The project is concentrating
initially on unifying the management of Ministry collections in
The Hague and at their embassies around the world. Using OLIB7,
library users and staff will benefit from powerful new features
like, Digital Asset Indexing (DAI). DAI provides harvesting and
indexing capability so that local and remote e-collections can be
organised and viewed in unison.
 A
main objective of the Digital Library is to ensure that search results
retrieved by users are tailored to their specific and often unique
needs. A particular emphasis therefore has been put on the
flexible and personalised approach that OLIB7 offers. For example,
preferred search terms can be created and linked by the institution,
using OLIB's thesaurus capability, which both guides the user and
optimises usage of materials.
In Summer 2007, an extended
service will go live integrating OCLC PICA's ZPORTAL and VDX products.
This will further extend the user's reach and enable the sharing
of resources seamlessly within the Ministry and with external partners.
CONTENTdm
acquired for accessing maps and theses
Two more prestigious European
institutions have acquired CONTENTdm for the purposes of opening
up access to their collections.
In France, the Université
Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg have purchased CONTENTdm to give students
online access to theses and early printed books. And in Spain, the
Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya have taken the system to
create digital images of the many maps they house.
LibraryLink
Victoria expands with addition of on-line databases
 VICLINK
is to expand their LibraryLink Victoria ZPORTAL implementation to
include authenticated access to VICLINK’s on-line databases
and to select health websites. The focus to date has been on providing
the general public with a single point of access to search the catalogues
of Victorian public libraries, state libraries, and Victorian-based
universities; and to provide public library patrons with the facility
to request inter-library loans. Patron access to on-line databases
will be implemented in March 2007.
The
LibraryLink
VDX and ZPORTAL systems are fully managed and hosted by OCLC PICA.
OLIB
Update
Last month all OLIB customers
received a letter to inform them that, in accordance with the OLIB
release process, OLIB 7.4 will be de-supported at the end of January
2008. Many sites have already upgraded to OLIB 7.6 and further site
upgrades to OLIB 7.6 are scheduled for the first half of 2007.
If you are running OLIB
7.4, your Account Manager will be writing to you during February
to invite you to upgrade your system to the latest version of OLIB,
and to set out platform requirements and typical upgrade costs.
After OLIB 7.4 is de-supported, the OCLC PICA Support team will
not be able to progress any support calls concerning the operation
of this version.
OLIB Timetable
| OLIB 7.3 |
De-supported from 1 January 2007 |
| OLIB 7.4 |
Supported until end of January 2008 |
| OLIB 7.5 |
Currently supported |
| OLIB 7.6 |
Currently supported |
| OLIB 2007 |
Production release
currently scheduled for May 2007 |
The next OLIB User Group
will be held on 27 March at Unilever's Research Facility in Colworth,
Bedfordshire, UK. As well as the usual User Group business meeting,
the update from OCLC PICA and the Open Forum session, the OLIB Product
Manager, George Bingham, will give an update on the latest developments
in OLIB, including a demonstration of the web-based administration
client which is currently in development. Full details will be distributed
and posted on OCLC PICA's Customer web site in due course.
National
catalogues of Sweden, Israel,
Bulgaria and New Zealand to be added to WorldCat
The
National Library of Sweden and OCLC have agreed to load the Swedish
National Bibliography into WorldCat. This contribution of approximately
two million Swedish records makes it the second largest Scandinavian
bibliographic database to be added to the global catalogue, after
the Finnish national library catalogue FENNICA was loaded in late
2005.
The
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Library have decided to contribute
their Cyrillic records to WorldCat. With this agreement between
the library and OCLC, the richness of the worldwide catalogue will
be further enhanced with a large number of non-Roman alphabet records.
The Academy of Sciences Library
collection contains approximately two million records, that are
being converted to MARC21 over time before they can be loaded.
The Academy of Sciences Library is a Legal Deposit Library in Bulgaria.
Also it has been agreed
that the approximately 1 million records of the Jewish National
and University Library (JNUL) will be loaded into WorldCat. Among
those are about 600,000 Hebrew script records, 60,000 Arab script
records and 60,000 Cyrillic script records. As the National Library
of Israel, National Library of the Jewish people and Central Library
of the Hebrew University, JNUL collects all materials published
in Israel as well as acquiring all publications appearing worldwide
that relate to Israel.
Further, OCLC and the
National Library of New Zealand have agreed to load the 8 million
national union calatogue records into WorldCat. Meaning that the
holdings of the 275 libraries in the country will also be visible
in WorldCat.
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