WebZ Dials up 13 Libraries, No Waiting

The Mall of America of library catalogs has just moved into a neighborhood near you – and parking is never a problem.

In fact, the only thing you have to park is your hands over a keyboard. Let your fingers do the cruising into the university’s MadCat site, and by choosing the WebZ interface, you’ll run smack dab into a mammoth collection of 55 million volumes from the libraries of 13 research universities.

Called the CIC Virtual Catalog, this library leviathan is – no hyperbole here – the largest catalog in the world. Big in this case is not just beautiful, it’s gorgeous.

Click on CIC, and you’ll see library collections pop up from Big Ten schools plus the University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago. You can search specific catalogs or use a prototype for broadcasting your search across all 13 universities simultaneously. (CIC stands for Committee on Institutional Cooperation, an academic consortium of research universities described on this page.)

Let’s say you want the now-out-of-print book A Noble Treason: The Revolt of the Munich Students Against Hitler, but it’s checked out at UW–Madison with one recall waiting. So you do a “simple search” and learn in seconds that seven other schools have a copy.

You can order the book through interlibrary loan directly from the university that has it. You know that the University of Chicago has A Noble Treason on its shelves, so you click on “Request,” enter your ID number, fill out the on-screen form, and that’s it. The book will appear at a campus library of your choice in less than a week, in most cases.

You also can do searches by author, subject or key word. So let’s look at what CIC can offer, ornithologically speaking, on the common loon. Turns out that nine universities have a total of 31 postings on loony matters, so dive in, look around and surface with what you need.

“A major benefit of this new access to MadCat and the CIC catalog is that you can use your Web browser as the interface,” says Nolan Pope, associate director for automation of the General Library System at UW–Madison. In other words, you don’t need the special software formerly distributed in the WiscWorld suite.

For electronic journals and texts represented in MadCat, such as the Journal of Modern History, you can click on the URL and link directly to the resource. Many of the commercial electronic resources are licensed for use by the university community only, so they can be accessed just from on-campus computers.

Pope adds that there are still technical issues to be resolved with the prototype broadcast search across CIC catalogs, but it generally works quite well.