Expanding the range of contributors
It so happened that when we announced Talis Source back in March we were at a FIL event at the British Library. We gave out packs of information to a room full of largely academic librarians, many of whom had not used Source's predecessor - UnityWeb and therefore had not contributed holdings to it. There had been a much larger contingent of academic libraries using UnityWeb in earlier days when there seemed to be many more academic institutional members of The Combined Regions, but when academic libraries withdrew from membership to that organisation, we got requests for their holdings also to be removed. A step I never quite understood - why should membership to any organisation negate the need for such a broad-ranging and extensive union catalogue as UnityWeb, to be maintained?
Perhaps the fortunes and objectives of UnityWeb were inseparably associated with The Combined Regions. Although, I know from regular meetings with TCR Board that we were always encouraging of new contributors - and it was never dependent on membership. There was also an issue relating to the ability of the software to take Marc21 data - something I'm happy to say we have now overcome. Or perhaps, UnityWeb was too closely allied to the objectives of interlending - again something which we are trying to overcome by enabling free access to search and discover - whatever an institutions' objectives are for doing that - whether they be for the purposes of ILL or otherwise. By removing the costs associated with search and discovery, we hope to create a much broader church of users.
Early signs are very encouraging - particularly from an academic perspective. Following on from our announcement that the National Library of Wales has endorsed the Talis Platform, by contributing its holdings, we have had several academic libraries either contributing for the first time, or refreshing their contributions after a period of not having done so.
These numbers include:
Bridgwater College
City of Westminster College
New College, Swindon
Roehampton University
Somerset College of Arts & Technology
Swansea Institute
Trinity College, Dublin
University of Dublin
University of East London
University of Sunderland
University of Surrey
Swansea University
University of Worcester
and there are a few more large academic libraries in the pipeline, that I will mention shortly. But its a great start to an exciting project.
Technorati Tags: resource sharing, resource discovery, Talis Platform,