By Clare Shreve
The library will be switching over to a new online Summit catalog, beginning Dec. 1, due to a payment influx and lack of improvements by the original provider.
"Summit," according to the Orbis Cascade Alliance Web site, "provides you with 28 million items from 36 academic libraries throughout Oregon and Washington."
The numbers are impressive, but the new subset of Summit, called Worldcat, will provide more access to books and articles from around the world. The Worldcat database contains more than 100 million items. This larger database represents the holdings of 69,000 libraries in 112 countries.
Not only do the numbers sound good, the price does too.
"The vendor we'd been using raised their prices enormously," University librarian and director Drew Harrington said. The price increase became unaffordable with a more than 100 percent increase in cost.
With a vendor who wasn't making improvements and only raising the price, a change had to be made. The new vendor, Worldcat, will adapt more rapidly to trends in technology to make the program as accessible and helpful as possible.
The University library looks at this change as moving to a new and better level.
"It does push us forward into the future," said senior librarian Caroline Mann.
The friendlier interface that's more akin to Amazon or Google, in terms of ease of navigation, should also help the transition.
"Although the look will be different, it will not be completely alien," Mann said.
University of Portland is not the only school making the move. The entire consortium of schools that originally operated on Summit has jointly decided to move to Worldcat.
"Moving Summit to this bigger forum, ultimately makes it a lot easier for students to find what they're looking for," Mann said.
Students can still expect fast delivery of items and an ease in retrieving them. There will be a convenient pass-through button to link users from the library Web site to Summit.
Feedback is welcome from students, staff and faculty.
"The more eyes we have on this the better," Mann said, who hopes for a smooth transition for students.
Some kinks are still being worked out of the system. For instance, last Thursday, "The Consortia Directors decided that until renewals were available in the new system, we would have loan periods of six weeks instead of four," Mann said. "This is the equivalent to the amount of time that is currently given for Summit loans."
Improvements for a smooth transition are being made little by little during the final weeks before the replacement happens.
However, if users are having problems with the system they should not hesitate to ask for assistance from a library staff member. Every staff member has been or is in the process of training to use the new and improved database. UP even hosted a two-day training for members of the consortium.
To stay on track with due dates for the new and the old Summit items you've received: Anything requested before Dec. 1 is due back by Dec. 12.
