The Consortium of Catalonian University Libraries (El Consorci de Biblioteques Universitàries de Catalunya)—comprised of nine of the most prestigious academic libraries in Spain—has entered in a partnership agreement with Innovative Interfaces for Encore for a Group. The Consortium libraries are Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona University, Catalonia Technical University, Girona University, Lleida University, the National Library of Catalonia, Open University of Catalonia, Pompeu Fabra University, and Rovira and Virgili University. The Consortium will leverage its existing Millennium Union Catalog and ILS implementations.
The Consortium’s Encore for a Group project integrates with Millennium and brings their collections into a single discovery environment without the need for CBUC staff or local staff maintenance. The implementation will make possible:
- Real-time access to holdings of different sites and item availability information
- Direct, patron-initiated requesting across the entire collected collection
- Improvement of the user experience through the introduction of 2.0 services
History of Cooperation
With the Encore for a Group implementation, the CBUC will reach a new milestone in user service and library cooperation. In 1996, the CBUC created a Union Catalog, which currently comprises more than 8 million documents from 167 Catalan libraries with an interlibrary lending agreement in place since 1998. In 2005, the CBUC selected the Millennium ILS to upgrade and modernize the Union Catalog, as well as its library operations technology. After a close and extended cooperation with Innovative on its Union Catalog, the CBUC plans to inaugurate the new Encore service for direct requesting and discovery of its holdings before the summer.
Lluís Anglada, director of the CBUC says: “We want to maximize the use of our collections, ease access to materials through the enhancement of our discovery tool, and to facilitate resource sharing. Often many patrons are waiting for books and other materials that are rarely used in another library. The Encore for a Group project will help us to link existing, but previously hidden, resources with the patrons who need them. With this new service we want to increase cooperation between libraries and to show that cooperation is a necessary tool for libraries to give better services with lower costs.”
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