MERLIN will involve all primary and secondary schools, junior colleges, Centralised Institutes and MOE's headquarters. It will optimize the use of library resources by providing a web-enabled on-line access system to search for titles and access the contents in libraries within and outside MOE.
“The Ministry of Education's requirements are a definitive statement of what school library systems require of their vendors and of emerging technologies. We are looking forward to helping MOE fulfill their vision of providing intelligent information access in Singapore's educational institutions,” Patricia Culkin, CARL President said.
This $3.5 million (Singapore) project will help fulfill MOE's vision of “Thinking Schools, Learning Nation.” CARL Corporation's Information Management and Delivery System (IMDS) will replace the current mix of locally maintained PC-based systems in the 360 libraries island-wide. NCS will oversee the overall management and function as the point of contact for both vendors and customers for this year-long implementation, targeted to complete by the end of 1999.
CARL's web-based public access solutions such as the multilingual versions of CARLweb and Kid's Catalog Web will allow users to toggle between languages without losing the context of the search and will include “intelligent access” reference pathfinders which promote literacy and language skills.
The new MERLIN system will operate from a central server powered by a six-CPU Tandem S7000 processor.
