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Lancashire County Library and Information Service which runs one of the busiest public library ILL units in England, has moved its lending and borrowing operations over to UnityUK.  In 2007/08, Lancashire made over 13,000 requests and supplied over 7000 items.

Lancashire has been using UnityUK to find locations since April 2006 and their catalogue, including holdings information, is now live within the service.  Early in 2008, they introduced UnityUK’s lending service into the authority and in July 2008 they moved over their requesting functions to the Unity UK service.

Peggy Eccles, Principal Librarian Bibliographical Services with Lancashire County Library and Information Service explains why, after many years with the same supplier, they chose to move, "The UnityUK service is a modern and intelligent service that we knew would help us to upgrade our processes and ultimately improve the service we provide to other libraries and our customers.  We have built a good reputation as a supplier to other public libraries and we believed it was important for us to join the thriving UnityUK user community."

With UnityUK in place, Lancashire has streamlined and fully automated both its lending and requesting functions; with no need to maintain separate files or handle hundreds of incoming email messages.  UnityUK’s built in rota building facility ensures that Lancashire can easily build long rotas where necessary and the system automatically tracks the progress of every request without the need for human intervention at any stage. This has enabled Lancashire to improve the efficiency of their service, reducing processing times for both requests and item supply.

UnityUK integrates closely with Lancashire’s library management system (LMS) to reduce the need for duplicating data entry in multiple systems.  Request details are automatically transferred from UnityUK into their LMS, and an automated process creates a catalogue record that is used for issuing the items to borrowers.  This high level of integration lowers the administrative overhead and reduces the opportunity for mistakes during data entry.

Peggy continues, "It was vital that our transition to UnityUK went smoothly, so OCLC put together a package for us that included workflow consultancy and process improvement prior to our move.  This gave us the opportunity to refine our processes and then tailor the service to meet our needs."

Learn more about UnityUK

OCLC is delighted to announce that Natural England has successfully implemented and is now live with the OLIB library management system in a project that took less than eight weeks to complete.

Natural England went live with their library service using the newly integrated system thanks to the swift response of the OCLC operations team. The team delivered implementation services, data conversion from the legacy systems and data load including MARC import. They also provided application and technical support, training and mentoring to new and existing OLIB users and project management. The result is an OLIB system that meets the needs of Natural England in their role of managing natural resources, enhancing biodiversity, landscapes, wildlife and access to the countryside.

Natural England has been an enthusiastic user of OLIB since 2002. They decided to migrate another incumbent library management system into OLIB for a number of reasons, including its thesaurus and image handling capabilities.

This successful project owed a lot to good communications maintained between all areas of the project. The OCLC staff worked well with other key project areas, to ensure that the migration completed on time. OCLC's contribution included: support in addressing all technical issues as they arose, their flexibility to meet the requirements of the client, and availability always to work at client location, as was required by this project.

"Since launching the integrated data on OLIB, our customers can now enjoy a more seamless experience with greater visibility to our information holdings across the organisation. Using just one system is a big advantage for the library staff and they are enjoying OLIB's flexibility", says Peter Wingate, Team Leader, Knowledge Management & Information Services, Natural England.

Learn more about OLIB

UnityUK is pleased to welcome back three subscribers to the UnityUK service. Middlesborough, Redcar and Cleveland and South Tyneside Public Libraries have all returned to UnityUK from an alternative resource sharing solution.

Julia Robinson, Support Services Librarian, Central Library, South Tyneside, explains the reasons for their return to the service.

"OCLC offered us a 6 week trial of UnityUK. 4 weeks into the trial we decided to subscribe because UnityUK had improved so much in the 2 years following our initial subscription. Our interloans staff are really impressed with the speed and content of the site, the speed of response from other users and the online help. We would be happy to recommend UnityUK to anyone in the Interloans Community."

The full integration of the LinkUK union catalogue data and holdings into UnityUK sees the realisation of a single UK national union catalogue. UnityUK is providing 170 UK public libraries access to over 9,300,000 titles and 50,500,000 holdings and to date has fulfilled over 112,000 requests from member libraries.

For more information on UnityUK please contact tcr@oclc.org