PSU to expand sources in research library

Researchers at Portland State will soon have over 100 million sources of information at their fingertips.

The Summit Catalog, the collaborative collection of 9 million volumes from 36 northwest colleges and universities, will converge with the WorldCat platform this winter, allowing Portland State users to access over 107 million resource materials from around the globe.

The WorldCat system is slated to go live on Dec. 1, according to library staffers, but will not be fully functional for library users until January 2009 for the official unveiling.

A sneak-peak of the new system revealed a user-view similar to Amazon.com’s book-search page. A search bar appears at the top of the screen, and a list of options on the left allows users to limit their search by media type.

A search can bring up thousands of hits from libraries all over the world, each list item showing location, availability and an image of the item’s cover. If multiple libraries have the same item, the user can instantly find it’s nearest available location. Branford P. Millar library chief librarians Adriene Lim and Helen Spalding said that they expect students will especially benefit from the MLA and APA citations automatically generated for every search hit, and the bibliography-building tool.

WorldCat also has a reading-list tool where users can create personalized “to read” lists online, in addition to the ability to write reader reviews for each title.

PSU joined the Orbis Cascade Alliance’s Summit Catalog in 2002, opening up the Millar library’s 1.5 million-volume collection to students and faculty from 36 colleges and universities in the Northwest.

Not only can students enrolled at Portland State request materials from those 36 libraries, but they can also directly check out materials from them.

“If you’re heading to Seattle for the weekend, you can go to University of Washington’s library and check out the book you need,” Spalding said.

Lim said that those features will continue to be provided to students after the switch to WorldCat, but noted that during the transition period, some functions will be temporarily unavailable.

Some of these unavailable features include Summit Renewals, and “Pick Up Anywhere,” a service that allowed students from Portland State (or any Summit school) to request a book from University of Washington and pick it up at Oregon State University.

“This feature won’t be available on day one with the new system, but will be back eventually, and only 3 percent of users use this service,” Lim said.

All materials from the libraries in the Summit program are shipped for free via courier service contracted exclusively for Summit.

Students can also request–not just look at–titles from the international collection loaned through the Online Computer Library Center, the library cooperative responsible for WorldCat.

These items come from thousands of libraries all over the world and are shipped through the mail service at a small fee.

Librarians said the current cataloging system used to search PSU’s library, Vikat, will not change and will remain active for students to search the library’s database.

“WorldCat offers new features that we couldn’t possibly have without it,” Spalding said, explaining the switch from Summit. “And we are going to keep implementing new information technology to make the best use of the tools out there to help [the students].”

Summit at a glanceLast year PSU students and faculty requested 40,000 items via SummitPSU is the second largest lender and requestor out of all 36 Summit schoolsWorldCat catalogs 107 million titles from thousands of libraries worldwideAdditional information about the transition can be found at www.orbiscascade.org/index/new-summit