Wednesday, March 22, 2017

OCLC Resource Sharing Conference 2017

March 14-16, 2017, I attended the OCLC Resource Sharing Conference in Virginia Beach, VA. This conference used to be named the ILLiad International Conference and was organized by Atlas Systems, Inc.  As OCLC announced their intent last year to build a new cloud based product to replace ILLiad, the conference changed hands and names. Users of the current OCLC ILL product, WorldShare ILL, were invited in addition to ILLiad users. 

The new product is named Tipasa after an ancient trading post and UNESCO World Heritage site in Algeria. Migration to Tipasa is by invitation from OCLC. OCLC began the Tipasa migration process last year by inviting small academic libraries using ILLiad “out of the box” to consider migrating.  Out of that group of @400, @75 volunteered to be early adopters.  To date, 26 of these libraries have gone live and others are in the queue to migrate.  OCLC is ready to begin phase 2 which will include medium academic libraries and those that use Rapid ILL.  Phase 3, which should begin in 1-2 years, will consist of large academics and Docline users.  (OCLC does not have a date by which they plan to have all 1,200 ILLiad libraries migrated.)

Tipasa uses responsive design to allow for the same look and feel regardless of the device on which it is used. It will include a patron interface like My Account in WorldCat Local/WorldShare Discovery.  Within this interface patrons will be able to place and monitor orders, receive links to articles, renew loans and cancel requests online.  The link to request checked out items via ILL will still be available in the catalog and will still populate those requests. 

Also, OCLC recently purchased Relais International which is now used mainly for consortia lending but has an ILL component.  While there is no OCLC roadmap for Relais yet, they plan to move it into the cloud and are in the early days of determining how to make Relais work with WorldShare Discovery.  Thus, OCLC eventually plans to provide 3 ILL services:  WorldShare ILL, Tipasa and Relais.






Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Academic Libraries Supporting Entrepreneurship online symposium

Some librarians from Toronto and Pennsylvania organized an online symposium called Academic Libraries Supporting Entrepreneurship. I provided a lightning round titled "What I’ve Learned from Four Years of Teaching a Three-Credit Entrepreneurship Research Class". The slides are posted at https://liaisonlife.wordpress.com/2017/03/02/alse/ .

The morning plenary focused on issues with using library business database subscriptions to support campus entrepreneurship projects. (The Bryan School has long emphasized experiential learning tied to local economic-development, so this is hardly a new issue here).

I missed the concluding plenary because I had to teach my class!

--Steve