UCLA

Sharon Shafer, Chair-Elect of NGCIG, launched the discussion by giving historical context to the third ever meeting of the Next Generation Catalog Interest Group. The first meeting of NGCIG addressed commercial alternatives to the traditional library catalog, the second meeting focused on non-commercial, open source endeavors while the third meeting was dedicated to next steps in next-generation catalogs. The meeting held presentations and discussion about two examples of recent next generation catalog endeavors. Karen Schneider (Evangelist for Equinox’s Evergreen support) shared what she does as an Evangelist by giving some real world, grounded information on the pluses and minuses of open source software as compared to proprietary software. Sara Davidson and Amy Kautzman (Members of the UC/OCLC Pilot Implementation Team) presented insights in to the benefits and challenges encountered while launching a next-generation consortial catalog (Melvyl) pilot using WCAT Local.