[WEB4LIB] One Big Catalog (Re: Important Article)

[Genevieve Engel]

>My employer, North Bay Cooperative Library System, is a library
>consortium in
>Northern California. We recently introduced a union catalog called
>"Supersearch"
>which includes the holdings of most of our member libraries. These
>library
>systems use a wide variety of online catalog software, including DRA,
>Innovative
>Interfaces, Dynix, and CARL. To my knowledge, Supersearch is the first
>time a
>union catalog has been able to provide copy status information that is
>drawn
>directly from several different computer systems running incompatible
>software.

Actually, I did the specifications for the University of California MELVYL
Catalog display of circulation status for records at UC Davis, running DRA,
and several other UCs running III.  The programmer implemented the displays
by sending Z39.50 queries to the campus systems, then reformatting the
results to place them within the MELVYL Catalog display.  I do not know if
other union catalogs had also implemented this earlier, but I don't believe
they had.

The data normalization and merging you get from a union catalog is, I
think, a significant benefit.  Integrating that with the
local-library-specific information such as circulation status seems to me
the best of both worlds.  It does also provide an excellent platform for
patrons to request items online both from their "own" library and through
ILL.  These features also exist in the MELVYL catalog.  My sense is that
we'll have a lot of these decentralized (institution- or
consortium-specific) systems rather than a single amazon.com-type system
for some time to come -- especially because I think a single system would
require a fee for each request, whereas users can often avoid most fees by
going through their local library's catalog to request items.

Genny Engel
gengel at sfghdean.ucsf.edu