WorldCat Navigator: a new future for our users

I spent three days last week attending a Summit migration meeting in Vancouver, Washington. It was really a three-part affair: a presentation by OCLC implementers on the OCLC WorldCat Navigator product; breakout sessions (I attended the one on technology); and, a final meeting-wide session with group reports and a Q&A session.

The good news is the WorldCat Navigator solution holds promise for users of the WSU Libraries specifically, the Alliance more broadly.

The most notable problems that came out of the meeting involved limits with the integrated library system of choice for the Alliance, Innovative Interfaces Millennium. Stated simply, III builds software solutions that encourage vendor-lock. III's Millennium does not provide support for important standards such as NCIP, and several participants in the technical meeting commented on problems with its Z39.50 server software. Libraries using the Millennium system's proprietary database must use III-created tools to retrieve data from the database. In other words, it's hard to get data out of the Millennium system in a standardized way.

The strength of the III Millennium software is in its rich feature set that has been built up over the years. Innovative Interfaces Millennium is the most heavily-used ILS among ARL libraries. Also, as a colleague commented, INN-Reach served the consortium well for many years. But, I question whether the Innovative Interfaces business/software development model will apply well in the future. The release of an API for III's discovery system, Encore, would help the company a great deal.

There will be major challenges with the WorldCat Navigator implementation, which involves the melding of several existing tools, including the WorldCat.org discovery platform, VDX, and, eventually, the EZproxy software. It is both a challenge - and an opportunity - that WSU Libraries users will, this fall, see book holdings beyond the consortium and journal article holdings similar to that displayed in the UC Melvyl (pilot) system. It will become extremely difficult to differentiate the consortium borrowing and interlibrary loan processes. The automation of processes will be done in phases, but again, the key limiter here isn't the OCLC toolset, it's the proprietary III Millennium system (including its approach to NCIP). The phased implementation will lead to some service setbacks, but I'm optimistic that, working together, we'll achieve a great result for our users in the end.

Current information on the Summit migration can be accessed at this site.