Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A.—Seven universities in the Catalonian region of Spain have signed a contract with VTLS Inc. to create a union database of their library holdings. The joint project, called the Catale Collectiu de les Universitats de Catalunya (CCUC), is spearheaded by a team coordinated by Joan Majo, vice-rector of the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. Sponsored by the department of universities of the autonomous government of Catalonia, the effort is to get underway in the first quarter of 1995.

The seven university libraries will combine their holdings to create a union database containing from 700,000 to 900,000 bibliographic and holdings records in CATMARC format on a dedicated server. All the libraries currently run VTLS locally. Uniquely, the CCUC expects to extract and load MARC holdings records from the local databases and then provide a mechanism for periodical updating of the records in batch mode.

Participating in the regional consortium are, in order of size, Universitat de Barcelona, Universitat Autbnoma de Barcelona, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Universitat de Girona, Universitat de Lleida, and the Universitat Rovira i Virgili.

The universities decided to join forces with VTLS to take advantage of the benefits of a union catalog, the first in Spain. "A union database increases the effectiveness of research by students, faculty and staff," said Majo. "Researchers can have improved access to materials, which can be requested directly through an interlibrary loan feature. Also, a union database enhances resource sharing and acts as a bibliographic and authority data resource."

Future plans for the CCUC call for access to CD-ROMs and locally mounted databases and gateways to the Internet.

According to VTLS President Vinod Chachra, in the world of virtual libraries union databases play the critical role of a locator service. "Just as the local online catalog is an index to a local collection, the union catalog acts as an index to a regional or national resource," said Chachra.

Chachra notes that the union catalog has many functions: for digitized data it acts as an index of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs); for book collections it acts as a reference source or interlibrary loan facilitator; and for a union list of serials it can act as a reference source for holdings or as a bibliographic source for 853 tags. More traditionally, union databases have been used as a resource for copy cataloging of bibliographic and authority records. "We expect that this Catalonian union catalog will be used for all these purposes," said Chachra.

VTLS Inc. is an international software company with head offices in Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A., and branch offices in Helsinki and Barcelona. VTLS has provided software and loading services for the following union database projects: CAVAL[R, the union catalog for the Commonwealth of Virginia; LINDA, the national union database for the Finnish Academic and Research Libraries; and the statewide union catalog in West Virginia. VTLS is also working on union catalog projects for Lund (Sweden) University and for the universities of western Switzerland and the Swiss National Library.