DUBLIN, Ohio, USA, 28 April 2011 – The Spanish consortium BUCLE ("Consorcio de Bibliotecas Universitarias de Castilla y León") has become the first institution in Spain to implement OCLC's WorldCat Local as its new Search and Discovery platform. The service delivers single-search-box access to more than 800 million items of the library's electronic, digital and physical collections.
BUCLE launched WorldCat Local as a group catalogue solution for the university libraries of Burgos, León, Salamanca and Valladolid. It will be available to the university's 100,000+ registered library users at the end of April 2011. With WorldCat Local, library users are not only able to access the library's local bibliographic records but also the titles from the BUCLE group catalogue and from OCLC's WorldCat.
"WorldCat Local was by far the best solution for the creation of a group catalogue for the BUCLE consortium. It's quick, easy to work with, and cost-effective, and it provides all four BUCLE member libraries with a single point of access to the different library catalogues. In addition, the integration with the WorldCat database gives the bibliographic patrimony of all four university libraries more visibility on the World Wide Web", said Fernando Martín Rodriguez, Technical Director of the BUCLE consortium.
Due to the integration of the WorldCat Knowledge Base users have direct access to electronic resources from search results, and a "View Now" feature on brief records connects users directly to the electronic articles and open-access content that their searches retrieve. More than 100,000 library users of the BUCLE member libraries will be enabled to search via a single search box – which eliminates the need to consult separate resources and interfaces – both the local library and the BUCLE group catalogue, as well as in all other WorldCat libraries. Search results include multiple formats of materials, including digital objects, electronic materials, databases, journals, music, video, audio, eBooks, theses and print.
Eric van Lubeek, Managing Director of OCLC EMEA, added: "OCLC is delighted to announce that BUCLE is the first European consortium which has implemented WorldCat Local as their Discovery solution. We are very proud of the strong cooperation, and the efforts BUCLE undertook to successfully conclude this project. In particular, the integration of the WorldCat Knowledge Base, and the associated ‘View Now' feature, connecting users to electronic articles and open-access content directly from the search results page, provides immense added value."
The implementation of WorldCat Local and the necessary participation in WorldCat allows the member libraries of BUCLE to raise the visibility of their collections to a global audience. As an immediate result, the interlibrary loan requests from outside the country have risen significantly. For the BUCLE universities WorldCat Local has proved to be a powerful but easy to use Discovery platform which allows the users doing their research on a unified interface, and giving them access to all available scientific materials from the university community of Castilla and León. The agreement has been facilitated by doc6 S.A. (www.doc6.es), OCLC's exclusive agent in Spain.
About BUCLE
Founded in 2002, one of the objectives of BUCLE ("Consorcio de Bibliotecas Universitarias de Castilla y León") is to optimize and share biblographic library data and library services among its member libraries of the university of Burgos, León, Salamanca and Valladolid. The targets rely on the development of common procedures, consortial acquisition and circulation and the cooperation among staff of their libraries. To implement these objectives, the Consortium provides funding for the participating universities, as well as additional funding from the head office of the universities of Castilla and León ("Dirección General de Universidades de Castilla y León").
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 171 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.org on the Web. For more information, visit the OCLC Web site.