By David DormanAmerican Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org
By David Dorman
American Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org
Library consultant for the Lincoln Trail Libraries System in Champaign, Illinois.
Column for December 1999
The state of Maine has contracted with Innovative Interfaces to provide the software for Maine Info Net, a statewide linking of over 300 libraries. INN-Reach, Innovative’s union-catalog and resource-sharing software, will be housed on a server located at the University of Maine/Orono. It will forge one statewide union catalog out of two consortia using Innovative software, several stand-alone Innovative systems, and a large number of stand-alone systems using a variety of vendors. The holdings of the non-Innovative libraries, along with the databases of the Innovative ones, will be loaded into a central server that will be managed by INN-Reach. Status information will be available only for records from Innovative systems. The INN-Reach server will also provide Web-based search and interlibrary loan services for the statewide catalog. To find out more information, visit Info Net and INN-Reach.
Maine’s selection of Innovative Interfaces follows a deal by the firm to provide a two-state union catalog that will also use INN-Reach software to manage a central union catalog. The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, whose members are 11 large research libraries and library systems in Wyoming and Colorado—now called “The Alliance” and not to be confused with CARL, the commercial vendor of ILS software and the ILS vendor for all but one of the Alliance’s members—is sponsoring a union catalog project for the states’ libraries called Prospector.
By mid-October, Prospector had loaded the data of 16 library catalogs representing over 10 million holdings onto a server located at Alliance headquarters in Denver. Alan Charnes, executive director of the Alliance, is calling Prospector a virtual library, because authorized patrons will be able to request a book from any library whose holdings are in Prospect. The request will not be mediated by library ILL staff, but will be handled directly by INN-Reach ILL software and delivered to the user’s local library. To find out more information, visit Prospector.
The state of Illinois is taking a different approach to statewide library access than Maine, Colorado, and Wyoming. At the Illinois Library Association annual conference in October, Jesse White, the secretary of state and state librarian, announced the launching of VIC, the Virtual Illinois Catalog. The Illinois State Library, working in cooperation with the state’s 12 multitype regional library systems and ILCSO (the Illinois Library Computer System Organization, which operates a union catalog for 45 academic libraries throughout Illinois), customized OCLC’s SiteSearch software to develop a Z39.50-based virtual catalog.
With over 600 libraries representing more than 50-million holdings, VIC may very well be the largest library union catalog—virtual or otherwise—that displays item status information to its users. Although unmediated interlibrary borrowing is not being offered to the public, an e-mail-based ILL-request procedure will be implemented before the end of the year. Currently only consortial catalogs are represented in VIC, but the state library hopes to begin adding local stand-alone systems in the first half of next year. In addition to having an ILS with a Z39.50 server, every library that becomes a part of VIC must agree to load and maintain all its holdings information in OCLC. To find out more information, visit VIC and SiteSearch.
Innovative’s INN-Reach software and OCLC’s SiteSearch software both provide holdings and status information, but beyond this similarity they take quite different approaches to union-catalog building. OCLC’s SiteSearch incorporates a server-based Z39.50 client and performs broadcast searching to multiple remote databases. INN-Reach relies on loading all bibliographic, holdings, and status information from each remote local system onto a central server.
Auto-Graphics, through its Impact/Online family of products, and The Library Corporation, through NetPAC and its newly announced NetPAC-Z product, also offer Web-based union catalog services for multivendor consortia. Like INN-Reach, NetPAC supports a Web-accessible central database that is updated on a periodic basis; in TLC’s case, the central database is hosted by TLC rather than by the consortium’s headquarters.
Auto-Graphics takes a mixed approach. One variation of the Impact/Online service can work like OCLC to connect to multiple remote Z39.50 servers. Another variation can, like NetPAC, host a union database from a server located at Auto-Graphics. And both Auto-Graphics and TLC provide management of ILL transactions.
Both the central database model and the Z39.50-based virtual model have their drawbacks in today’s market. As of today, no centralized union catalog made up of multivendor library systems supports real-time status information. The virtual model is the only one that can currently provide real-time status information, but it does not scale well for heavy use of statewide broadcast searching, especially when small systems are involved. And even now, very few vendors implement more than a small portion of the Z39.50 standard for bibliographic databases. Texas libraries are tackling the Z39.50 implementation shortcomings with the Texas Z Initiative, an effort by Texas libraries of all types to develop a consensus on the Z39.50 features required to effectively share networked resources in the state; but the current support in the library-vendor community for Z39.50 leaves great room for improvement. However, with more and more states planning union catalogs, we can expect to swiftly see new and improved products and services in this very dynamic market.
Union catalog planners seeking more information on the Z Texas Initiative can obtain a copy of the Z Texas Profile or find background information.