OCLC Challenges ILS Vendors with Web-Based Management Service
In what clearly represents a challenge to the integrated library system (ILS) industry, OCLC announced April 23 that it has created what it calls “the first web-scale cooperative library management service,” inviting member libraries to “take the first step to realizing this cooperative service model with a new, ‘quick start’ version of the OCLC WorldCat Local service.” The service expands WorldCat Local’s cataloging and discovery tools to include functions now performed in most libraries by a locally installed integrated library system.
The April 23 announcement came about three months after OCLC agreed to delay, pending review, implementation of its proposed “Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records” over concerns that the policy as originally drafted could restrict the library community’s rights to use records, even ones that individual libraries had themselves added to the database.
“Our strategy to move library management systems to web scale builds on OCLC’s 40-year history of innovation and cooperation,” says Jay Jordan, OCLC president and CEO. “In 1967, OCLC Founder Fred Kilgour revealed a strategy to create an online union catalog through shared cataloging in order to reduce individual transaction costs for libraries. The result has been WorldCat, which has saved libraries millions of dollars in cataloging and interlibrary loan costs. Today, we are extending that strategy of cooperation to reduce the costs of library management functions such as circulation and acquisitions. Our goal is to lower the total cost of managing library collections while enhancing the library user’s experience.”
OCLC Executive Director for Networked Library Services Andrew Pace observes on his Hectic Pace blog that the announcement represents “a first step to WorldCat Local and to a truly next-generation cooperative library management service.” Pace, who joined OCLC in 2007, says he has spent the last 15 months working on the project. “I’ve been listening to the library community,” he says, “trying to put their views into a strategy, and creating something new that I hope will represent a real sea-change for libraries and the OCLC cooperative.”
Pace notes that he first advocated dismantling library management systems five years ago and is now “confident that using web-scale architectures and a cooperative service model are the right way to put things back together again.” Library testing of the circulation component of the service will begin this summer, he adds, with other components to follow in phases. Initial pilot libraries will be named soon, and an advisory council is in the works.
“Visits to libraries, focus groups, and over a decade of engagement in the library automation world have convinced me that libraries require less complexity in their management systems,” says Pace. “To truly deliver network-level services—a platform-as-a-service solution—and not simply internet-hosted solutions of current library services, new system architectures and workflows must be built that are engineered to support web-scale transaction rates and web-scale collaboration. OCLC is in a unique position to create cooperative network effects in library management services on a par with OCLC Cataloging and OCLC Resource Sharing.”
OCLC released a report in March titled Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want, the results of a 2008 study, the findings of which indicate, among other things, that although library catalogs are often thought of as discovery tools, the catalog’s delivery-related information is just as important to end users.
American Libraries interviewed Andrew Pace April 24. An edited transcript of that conversation is available here.
Posted on April 24, 2009; interview link added April 29, 2009.