Global library cooperative OCLC, US, has signed an agreement with Sabinet, its partner in South Africa. The deal is to provide WorldCat Local, OCLC's discovery service, as a single point of access and delivery of electronic, print and digital resources to the National Library of South Africa and 15 academic institutions, offering a simplified discovery and delivery experience to end-users. Sabinet is a major supplier of online information to libraries in sub-Saharan Africa.
With WorldCat Local, links to the full-text of licensed electronic content give users seamless access to all the library's resources from a single search box. For the librarian, evaluation of those resources is greatly simplified by WorldCat Local's aggregated presentation of usage statistics, making comparisons much easier.
As part of a recent agreement between OCLC and Sabinet, libraries will now be able to access Sabinet's African content on WorldCat Local, as well as the OCLC-licensed resources already on the platform.
Where there is need to consult print items, WorldCat Local displays location and availability details.
Users of the system can also use inter-library loan services in instances where there is neither print nor electronic provision of the item required in a local library. In addition to OCLC's WorldCat Resource Sharing service, WorldCat Local will also link to South Africa's national inter-library loan system, managed by Sabinet. Together, these two services represent a significant expansion of library collections.
Based in South Africa, Sabinet has worked in partnership with OCLC since 1995, acting as distributor for them in sub-Saharan Africa since 1997 when they also began cataloguing South African information resources onto the OCLC platform. This agreement was extended in 2000 to catalogue directly onto WorldCat.
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