Montana Library Card Project Blog

This Montana Library Card blog is being created Monday, March 20, 2006, to help manage a joint project involving partner libraries from the Montana Shared Catalog, Jennifer Pearson's work group from OCLC's Group Services, the Mansfield Library at the University of Montana, and Bonnie Williamson of the Hi-Line Catalog which is served from the Havre-Hill Public Library.

This pilot project's goal (from the State Library's perspective) is to see if we can extend the functionality enjoyed by patrons of MSC's Partner libraries (unmediated discovery and request, rapid materials delivery) to Montana library users being served by other integrated library systems.

We'd like, for instance, a patron at the UM to be able to discover and request an item from anywhere in the UM or MSC bibliographic databases, from within her UM Endevour system's catalog interface, and have it delivered (without interlibrary loan-type library staff mediation) to either the UM Mansfield Library, or directly mailed to the user.

While we know that the MSC could work with UM to build a peer-to-peer (P2P) connection, using NCIP (Niso Circulation Interchange Protocol), we think that these P2P relationships won't scale well, maintenance-wise, in libraries with already busy small information technology staffs. We're interested in NCIP-enabled P2P relationships between many Montana library systems, and we think that OCLC, acting as a sort of Babel Fish, will enable us to provide MSC Partner-like service between disparate ILSs.

We understand that OCLC has parallel but slightly different goals. I understand Jennifer will e-mail these to me shortly, and I will post her thoughts here for your review and comment.

So this is the beginning of a pilot project that may, or may not, point the way to establishing a Montana Libary Card. What is a Montana Library Card? See the next blog posting.