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AccessMichigan: The Challenges and Rewards of Statewide Library Cooperation

Slide 8 of 17

Implementing the Vision

• My soapbox: Down with hyphenates
• An ad hoc committee (be still, your hearts!): intentionally, even defiantly, multi-type
• Building success one transaction at a time: the Traverse City experience

Rant about hyphenates for a few minutes. Use the united front lesson as the groundwork.

Came up with the name AccessMichigan as an umbrella terms for the project.

Discuss the ad hoc committee we put together to review the bids we received. Discuss the compromise decision to buy First Search and IAC’s (now the Gale Group’s) General Reference Center Gold.

We announced the service a few weeks before it was ready to fly and started lining up the libraries. Different libraries were at different levels of technological savvy, so we had to deal with everything from web access to dial up modems. Access to the services was provided primarily by password and authorization; some IP recognition was supported, especially with the IAC product.

The first success story came in within a few weeks. A client had walked into the library in Traverse City. (USE HAND TO SHOW WHERE TC IS LOCATED.) He said there was a book he’d been looking for and he wondered if they had it. They didn’t but someone remembered this new-fangled FirstSearch system that provided a way into World Cat. Sure enough, the book was there, but it was only held in two libraries. One of them was in New Zealand. Thinking, “Here goes nothing,” the librarians sent an interlibrary loan request to the library, and two weeks later, they had the book, along with an astonished note from the librarian in New Zealand, wondering where on earth Traverse City is and how the librarian there knew about the library in New Zealand!