Colleges join growing community moving to cloud-based library management services from OCLC

Oct. 5, 2011 - PRLog -- Mohave Community College, in northwest Arizona, recently signed on and Ogeechee Technical College, in Statesboro, Georgia, is now “live” with OCLC Web-scale Management Services (WMS), the Web-based cooperative library management tools for metadata management, acquisitions, circulation, license management and workflow improvement. WorldCat Local, OCLC’s service for discovery, delivery and user self-service, is part of the WMS solution.

“WMS has been a very positive change for all of us,” said Dr. Lynn Futch, Dean for Library Services, Ogeechee Technical College, the first technical college to go live with WMS. “Our students love it. Instead of looking at a long set of instructions, students can simply type what they’re looking for in a single search box in WorldCat Local. Students are also able to create and maintain their own accounts, which is something they had not been able to do in the past.”

“The best part for me as a librarian is that WMS has made it possible for us to streamline processes to get books on shelves and into students’ hands. What used to take a couple of days to accomplish can now be done in a couple of hours. WMS works like it was built with libraries and librarians in mind,” said Dr. Futch.

Ogeechee Technical College selected WMS in April as an early adopter of OCLC Web-scale Management Services. Early adopter libraries worked with OCLC staff through planning and testing of the new cloud-based service for the benefit of the entire OCLC cooperative. Libraries worldwide are collaborating to create a shared future through the OCLC Web-scale services. (See video presentations from OCLC members describing their experiences with WMS on the website.)

“Excellent support and awesome training made us feel very prepared to make the move to WMS,” said Dr. Futch. “A part-time library assistant said to me the other day, ‘One screen—just one screen, and I can do everything I need to do.’”

Ogeechee Technical College is a public institution of higher education that contributes to the economic, educational, and community development of its three-county service area of Bulloch, Evans, and Screven counties in Georgia.

Mohave Community College (MCC), which selected WMS in July, serves more than 13,000 students in the northwest portion of Arizona and neighboring communities in California, Nevada and Utah.

According to MCC’s director of library services, OCLC Web-scale Management Services will help to ensure that all Mohave Community College students—on campus and those on the Distance Education campus—have better access to all types of library materials—electronic, print, and digital formats.

“It’s very important that our students are able to search in WorldCat Local (the discovery tool for OCLC WMS) to access all types of materials, including electronic databases,” said Claudia Timmann, Director of Library Services. “If we do not have a particular item in the general collection, students need to know that they can request it through the interlibrary loan process. With WMS and WorldCat Local, MCC students will not have to keep digging for the information they need—it will be at their fingertips.”

Mohave Community College strives to meet the growing workforce needs of regional business and industry and to provide development and training opportunities for the area of small business development. The College offers programs that provide skills, training and specialized education that gives students rewarding careers, including the academic foundation to continue their education. More about Mohave Community College can be found at www.mohave.edu.

Libraries using Web-scale Management Services will lower the total cost of ownership for their library’s management and free staff time for higher-priority services. As more institutions migrate to WMS, libraries will be able to share data, applications and workflow improvements with peer institutions, end users and partners.

There are currently 30 libraries using OCLC Web-scale Management Services; and 151 libraries worldwide have committed to the new service. OCLC Web-scale Management Services was released for general availability July 1, 2011.

More about OCLC Web-scale Management Services can be found on the OCLC website.

About OCLC
Founded in 1967, OCLC is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing library costs. More than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries have used OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend, preserve and manage library materials. Researchers, students, faculty, scholars, professional librarians and other information seekers use OCLC services to obtain bibliographic, abstract and full-text information when and where they need it. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the world’s largest online database for discovery of library resources. Search WorldCat on the Web at www.worldcat.org. For more information, visit www.oclc.org.