WISCAT Project

The Division for Libraries, Technology and Community Learning has facilitated resource sharing in Wisconsin for twenty years with the production of a statewide union catalog of library holdings called WISCAT. The current edition of WISCAT, one of the largest physical statewide union catalogs in the country, contains 7 million titles and more than 32 million holdings from over 1200 contributing libraries. The catalog contains material in all formats, including books, serials, videorecordings, sound recordings and other audiovisual formats.

The Division has now completed the migration of the statewide library union catalog (WISCAT) and interlibrary loan management (WISCAT ILL) to a new totally web-based environment. While there still remains much work in customizing and adjusting the system to fit the needs of the Wisconsin resource sharing community, the implementation of the first two phases of the project are well underway. During 2001, the Division staff and a committee of representatives from the Wisconsin library community had evaluated bid proposals for the implementation of a new web-based statewide resource sharing system to replace the existing WISCAT and QuILL programs. The evaluation committee chose to partner with two vendors in moving toward a more integrated resource sharing environment. The Division issued contracts to the vendors in September 2001, and implementation was in full swing by the beginning of 2002.

The first piece of the new resource sharing system to be implemented was the union catalog. The WISCAT union database, a twenty-year investment in resource sharing, was transferred from the previous vendor to the new vendor, Auto-Graphics of Pomona, California. The data was converted, de-duplicated, consolidated, and output to the new union catalog Web interface. For more complete information on WISCAT database processing, see Bibliographic Quality Control in WISCAT. The servers that run the statewide catalog were physically moved from California to Wisconsin. The WISCAT servers now reside at the DoIT computing center on the UW-Madison campus. The servers are managed and maintained by staff from the WISCAT project rather than being maintained by the vendor. This gives staff more flexibility in managing the data updates to this large union catalog.

The catalog is updated weekly with new holdings as libraries and consortia submit snapshot files of their local and shared catalogs. Each shared system is encouraged to submit a file for complete replacement of holdings every 6 months. Libraries are also able to add and maintain their own holdings interactively on existing bibliographic records in the catalog. This is a very popular feature of the new system. Libraries have found the interactive updating to be easy and efficient.

The union catalog also allows libraries to download individual MARC records for use in local online catalogs, or to obtain an extraction of all the records they are listed as owning. Libraries can create and send electronic interlibrary loan forms to request the items they find in the catalog from the owning libraries.

The second piece of the new resource sharing system to be implemented was the interlibrary loan management software. This software, referred to as WISCAT ILL, was created by Fretwell-Downing, Inc. This product is used in several other statewide and regional projects, most notably in Colorado and Ohio. The WISCAT ILL software manages the interlibrary loan requests that libraries create from the union catalog. It creates an intelligent lender string of possible places to send the request, transmits the request to the owning library, tracks the request and maintains statistics on those transactions. After the first six months of operation, over 400 libraries had begun using the new interlibrary loan management system at one level or another. This number substantially exceeds the 175 libraries that were participating directly in the previous QuILL interloan management system after six years. Traffic on the new system so far has averaged around 20,000 requests a month.

Libraries are able to participate in the new interlibrary loan system at a number of levels. They may fully participate by being both a borrower and a lender; they may choose to just request materials but have another library or agent monitor their incoming requests; or they may agree simply to lend materials to others on the system. Individual library patrons are able to monitor the status of their own requests. The Division is investigating the possibility of expanding the interlibrary loan service in the future with patron-initiated requests.

The third phase of the new resource sharing system is still in the early implementation phase. The WISCAT ILL software has the functionality to operate as a Z39.50 gateway, often called a "virtual library". Linking libraries together through a gateway will allow library staff and patrons to enter a single search query, have that query search multiple library OPACs or other types of databases, determine which libraries have particular items available, and facilitate the interlibrary loan of those items. Libraries or consortia that wish to participate as targets in the Z39.50 gateway may contact the Division staff for a profiling questionnaire.

The gateway concept, as implemented by the new resource sharing system, utilizes several national standards in carrying out the linking process. The Z39.50 standard allows searching of one or more local library or system catalogs. The 3M Standard Interchange Protocol (SIP) and the emerging NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP) will facilitate the link between interlibrary loan transactions and circulation processes.

For a draft plan detailing tasks for the DPI - Division for Libraries, Technology & Community Learning to complete toward the full implementation of the WISCAT resource sharing system, see WISCAT/WISCAT ILL Implementation Plan 2003-2004.