University of California Will Use WorldCat Local As Next Gen Melvyl Infrastructure

From a California Digital Library Blog Post by Ellen Meltzer:

With the endorsement of the University Librarians, UCLA purchasing is now processing the paperwork to procure WorldCat Local (WCL) as the infrastructure for Next Generation Melvyl; once finished, Melvyl @ University of California will become UC’s official Melvyl discovery and access service.  The decision was made after an initial pilot launch in April 2008 and an extensive evaluation phase beginning in August of 2009 that included input from UC students, faculty, staff, librarians, and from those outside the UC system.  In addition, three rounds of usability testing were conducted with UC students and faculty, and with users at other WCL institutions.  OCLC has brought in improvements and enhancements based on our bug reports, usability tests and feedbacks on a monthly and quarterly basis.

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Using WorldCat Local moves discovery beyond the local level to the network level. While limiting the scope of discovery to local catalogs made sense in the analog library in order to meet timely delivery expectations, this technique makes less sense in the digital library environment, where the delivery of information to users depends less on a user’s location than on her

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