The Bureau de coopération interuniversitaire (BCI), a coalition of Québec universities, has selected OCLC's WorldShare Management Services as the library services platform for 17 of its members.
WorldShare Management Services (WMS) is a cloud-based library services platform with WorldCat as its foundation that allows library staff to draw on the collaborative data and work of libraries worldwide for more efficient workflows. WMS also enables staff to better manage resources in all formats and provide their users with improved access to the library's collections and the world's knowledge.
The selection of WMS followed a rigorous evaluation process that spanned more than a year. Among the BCI objectives for this innovative project: create a network with a single, shared platform for participating Québec university libraries; provide flexibility for individual institutions to maintain their identities; use the shared platform to expand cooperation among member libraries; and enhance the end-user experience through a merged union catalog within a bilingual environment.
OCLC and BCI have agreed to jointly develop a unique feature that will improve the searching experience of bilingual and multilingual users through a combination of tools using artificial intelligence, automated translation and the use of controlled vocabulary, such as the Répertoire des vedettes-matière (RVM). This new concept will prevent users from having to repeat the same searches in other languages to retrieve records.
Together, the coalition of Quebec university libraries holds 10 million print and electronic titles. The BCI partnership comprises French and English academic libraries. They will manage records in one union catalog for a bilingual community, circulating material among all partnership libraries when they go live with WMS.
BCI's move to WMS builds on several recent large-scale OCLC cooperative initiatives in Canada. Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is now using WorldShare Management Services as its platform to manage its library services and two authority files (French Names and Canadian Subject Headings). LAC went live with WMS, locally named Aurora, in December 2018. LAC is also using WorldCat as the foundation of Canada's new National Union Catalogue, Voilà, launched earlier in 2018. The University of Winnipeg (December 2018) and McGill University (May 2019) also recently started using WMS.
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