Orbis Cascade Alliance and WorldCat Navigator

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Orbis Cascade Allianceand WorldCat Navigator
May 8, 2009 MSC Meeting

• Kyle Banerjee
• Digital Services Program Manager

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Orbis Cascade Alliance
Oregon Washington Private Public, 2-year
4-year Colleges, Universities, Community
colleges Members serving 600 42,000 students
(FTE)
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36 Full Members

• Central Oregon Comm. College
• Central Washington University
• Chemeketa Community College
• Clark College
• Concordia University
• Eastern Oregon University
• Eastern Washington University
• George Fox University
• Lane Community College
• Lewis Clark College
• Linfield College
• Mt. Hood Community College
• Oregon State University
• Oregon Health Science Univ.
• Oregon Institute of Technology
• Oregon State University
• Pacific University
• Portland Community College

7 Puget Sound
5 Eastern
20 Willamette Valley
2 Central
Cascade Range
2 Southern
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Major Programs

• Electronic Resources
• 62 libraries in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Hawaii
• Databases, ejournals, ebooks, etc.
• Northwest Digital Archives
• 31 libraries and archives in Oregon, Washington,
  Idaho, Montana, and Alaska
• EAD finding aids, union database, digital content
• Summit Resource Sharing System
• 36 academic institutions in Oregon and Washington
• 9.2 million unique titles, 28.7 million items
• WorldCat Navigator 2009
• INN-Reach 1993-2008
• All members use III Integrated Library System

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Major Programs

• Conferences Workshops
• ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication
• Code4Lib Northwest
• Cooperative Collection Development
• YBP agreement
• Distributed Print Repository
• Courier Service
• 280 libraries served through 80 dropsites in
  Oregon, Washington, Idaho
• 400,000 packages per year
• Digital Services
• Digital collections, institutional repositories,
  etc.

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Summit Fulfillments FY03-08
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What do we care about?
Service
Training
Satisfaction
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How do we get those things?

• Identify common operations and redundancies
• Work at the highest appropriate level

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What is WorldCat Navigator?

• A hosted resource sharing platform (not an ILS)
• Discovery experience based on WorldCat Group (a
  multi library version of WorldCat Local)
• Delivery based on Navigator Request Engine (NRE)
• Circulation functions (paging, most alerting,
  billing, check in/out) currently handled by local
  ILS

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WorldCat Local Individual library catalog based
on Worldcat.org discovery interface
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WorldCat GroupWorldCat Local instance that
contains holdings of multiple libraries
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WorldCat Group record view
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Group/Local is a union/shared catalog hybrid
Shared Catalog
Union Catalog
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Navigator Request EngineStaff interface with
resource sharing functionality
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Motivations for the migration

• A better patron experience
• More things that patrons need are not physically
  in the library, so improved discovery is needed
• Strategic benefits
• Move towards network level services and reduction
  of redundant systems and workflows
• Standards based solution essential for long term
  viability and bringing disparate services
  together
• Leadership opportunity
• Partnership with OCLC

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Timeline

• March 2008
• Board decision to work with OCLC to develop
  Navigator
• Implementation Team and workgroups formed
• October 15
• WorldCat Navigator delivered
• November
• Work out bugs, get trainers and staff up to speed
• December 1
• Showtime!

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• In preparing for battle I have always found that
  plans are useless, but planning is
  indispensable.
• -- General Dwight D. Eisenhower

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How we spent our time

• Holdings reclamation
• WorldCat Local and Navigator depend on accurate
  holdings data
• Configuration
• In NRE Request managing locations, shelf and
  pickup locations, notices, institutional
  patrons, paging slips, holds, etc
• Hundreds, possibly thousands of parameters
• At local sites (varies with ILS) network
  connectivity, indexing, reclamation, accounts,
  holds, paging slips, firewall, load tables,
  templates

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How we spent our time (continued)

• Training/Communication
• Hundreds of staff affected
• Circ/ILL reconfiguration
• Faculty and patrons need to be informed
• Managing the jitters
• Developing components
• Resolver Resolver
• ILL Resolver
• Batch paging slips

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The Resolver resolver
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Paging slip
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WorldCat Local quick start
Has
Lacks

• Displays local resources first
• Availability for a single library
• Local branding
• Links for local OpenURL and ILL fulfillment
• Article citations in WorldCat.org

• Group level searching
• Place requests for materials in your local
  library or libraries within your consortium
• Statistical reports
• Refine searches to a specific branch within a
  library system when Local Holdings Records are
  present

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Consortial workflow and fairness is important

• More trust and efficiency than ILL
• Shared information barcodes, paging slips
• Any valid patron anywhere can request unmediated
• Load balancing ensures all institutions
  benefit/contribute
• Before automated load balancing, only 11
  institutions have received/shipped ratio between
  0.9 and 1.1.
• Huge disparities. Worst ratio is 9.1
• After using automatic load balancing for two
  months
• 86 of membership has shipped/received ratio
  between 0.9 and 1.1
• About 3/5 of libraries have ratio between 0.95
  and 1.05
• Worst ratio is 1.1 (11 items received for every
  10 lent)
• Expect rates to improve with time

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Navigator resource sharing at a glance
May be in development and/or related to lack of
III standards support
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Side effects

• Varies by institution
• Consorital borrowing is down but ILL is up,
  particularly for nonreturnables
• Staff workload manageable at all sites
• Fulfillment rates down. Consortia wide for months
  of March and April is 84. Highest is 97. Lowest
  is 77.
• Fulfillment times are up
• Relatively few complaints

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Next steps

• The network ILS
• Do we really need to search, download, and
  catalog the same record 36 times?
• Should authority control, serials publication
  patterns, vendor data, etc really be that
  different at different institutions?
• Network circ allows easy formation of arbitrary
  groups
• Shared catalog
• Best level to deliver service may be at
  consortial rather than global level
• Standards based. Proprietary silos cause
  headaches later
• OLE
• Standardization at service and protocol level
• Compatible with other approaches

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During periods of rapid change

• Expect people to go through these stages
• Skepticism and unfavorable comparisons between
  old ways and new
• Finding a groove
• Learning to leverage strengths of new
  systems/methods
• Make it work, make it fast, make it slick (in
  that order)
• Dont fixate on or sweat the small stuff
• Keep your eye on the prize

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Transforming good ideas into reality

• Be practical
• No solution can require everyone to move at the
  same time
• Hard part is connecting the future to the present
  as it is
• Progress requires upsetting the status quo
• Collaborative efforts cause discomfort and local
  change
• Individual or institutional objections should not
  be dismissed, but they also should not be used as
  a reason not to proceed
• Doing things halfway to appease those raise
  concerns can make the pain far worse

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Some parting thoughts

• Buy in is critical
• Communication is key for having people take
  ownership of the process
• Understanding pain points is essential to
  maintaining credibility with front line workers
• The devil is in the details
• The greatest advances occur when things dont
  work out according to plan
• Always have a Plan B and be ready to develop Plan
  C, Plan D, and .

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Questions?
May 8, 2009 MSC Meeting

• Kyle Banerjee
• Digital Services Program Manager