Using Resource Sharing Standards in the Orbis Cascade Alliance Consortial Borrowing System

In December 2008, the Orbis Cascade Alliance (“the Alliance”) migrated to Worldcat Navigator (“Navigator”) to support consortial borrowing. Consortial borrowing is different from interlibrary loan (ILL) in that it is both unmediated and fully automated so it uses a much more streamlined circulation workflow. The purpose of Navigator is to allow any patron from an alliance member library to request items owned by any Alliance library and provide the staff functionality necessary to process those requests.

Navigator serves two distinct proposes:

1. Patron discovery: This is provided by a group instance of WorldCat Local (http://summit.orbiscascade.org) where patrons can see and place unmediated requests for items owned by the Alliance, as well as those not held by the Alliance, in one discovery system.
2. Staff request processing: Consortial borrowing is a cross between traditional circulation and ILL workflows. To serve patron needs and allow efficient request processing, the system automates functions such as placing holds, checking materials in and out of each local ILS, creating temporary bibliographic and item records, and triggering notices to patrons. Standards play an essential role in automating resource sharing within the Alliance. However, there are certain critical functions where standards cannot yet be used so workarounds have been implemented.

Background

The Alliance is a consortium of 36 academic libraries in the Pacific Northwest that serves a combined total of roughly 250,000 patrons. The member libraries of Orbis Cascade Alliance are committed to making their combined collections available as a single collection—meaning that any patron can check out materials from any library without limitation.

From 1995 to 2008, the Alliance used Innovative Interfaces’ (III) INN-Reach software to facilitate borrowing and lending of materials. INN-Reach allowed libraries with III Millennium systems to use a basic circulation workflow for consortial borrowing. By policy, Alliance patrons requested physical materials from any library as if they were a local patron. Non-returnables such as article photocopies were requested via ILL.

In March of 2008, the Alliance’s governing body voted to migrate to a new consortial borrowing system: OCLC’s WorldCat Navigator. In December 2008, the Alliance started using Navigator in production. Although INN-Reach and Navigator are designed to fulfill many of the same functions, Navigator also supports discovery and processing of ILL materials and other nonreturnable requests and, since it is based on standards, Navigator is potentially better suited to groups with multiple ILS platforms.

Limitations of Standards in Resource Sharing

While standards have been essential to the success of Navigator, standards support alone would not have been sufficient for a successful resource sharing product. Excluding authentication with local campus systems and authorization issues, all that Navigator needs to function well is good Z39.50 and NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP) support. However, the Millennium systems that Alliance libraries use can neither initiate NCIP messages nor respond to them from Navigator. Moreover, for reasons that will be discussed later, using Z39.50 is problematic for providing consortial borrowing services.

The reality is that standards are helpful for facilitating certain operations, but not others—even when a standard exists specifically to support that function. the general challenges to using standards for resource sharing include the following:

Available standards do not adequately address some practical concerns. For example, if implemented strictly, patrons must pick up items at their affiliated library and no other.

Systems implement standards in unusable or suboptimal ways. Screen scraping is faster and more reliable than using standards for some operations.

Data necessary to use the standard properly do not exist, are inconsistent, or are provided in a form that cannot be used directly. For example, automatic volume selection is problematic because enumeration is expressed inconsistently.