from the CCC floor

This has been a productive conference for me. I've attended sessions and visited with colleagues on the Orbis Cascade Alliance's migration from III INNReach to OCLC WorldCat Navigator. While the WCN product is still in development, it does offer the ability to consolidate document delivery workflows, a task that I worked extensively with a decade ago at NLM, during the Relais implementation. WCN is even more far reaching in most respects, in that the public can search and request in a significantly modernized discovery system.

Attending this conference has confirmed in my mind just how marginalized the ILS has become. Consistent with the Ex Libris presentation on its open platform strategy, the ILS is just one data source - out of many different product types - that the company is enabling developer access to.

In thinking hard about document delivery workflow consolidation, it's clear that users have to submit requests based upon factors such as the services a library subscribes to, the distinction between free and fee-based services, and the internal organizational structure of a library. Even the WCN support that transcends some of these factors is developmental, with the most promising capabilities (tight integration with ILLiad) planned for future releases.

I feel fortunate that my institution has been deeply involved in the INNReach to WCN migration, but most of the user benefits from this migration, like consolidating document delivery workflows into a single stream, are ahead of us.