McGill University partners with BCI & coalition of 17 other Quebec universities to implement three digital platforms including a unified catalogue

McGill Library is happy to announce a partnership with the Bureau de coopération interuniversitaire (BCI) and a coalition of 17 other Quebec universities to provide the Quebec scholarly community with access to three digital platforms:

- Shared Library Services Platform (LSP) - phased roll out summer 2020: A unified catalogue providing access to more than 20 million documents across the 18 collections and supported by OCLC's WorldShare Management Services (WorldCat). The LSP will be a single portal for searching, accessing and requesting documents from Quebec universities.

- GéoIndex - now available: A shared platform used by Quebec universities to discover, disseminate and download geospatial data.

- Dataverse - available spring 2020: “Open source software developed by the Institute of Quantitative Social Studies (IQSS) at Harvard University that allows researchers to deposit and share small and medium datasets. Since 2012, Scholars Portal has hosted an instance of Dataverse and recently completed a project, with the support of the Université de Montréal, to provide a bilingual interface. Over the next months, each university library in Quebec will work to set up an institutional Dataverse on the Scholars Portal instance, making the service accessible to its community of researchers.”

Currently, Quebec's 18 university institutions use 10 different systems. With the maturing of technologically-advanced alternatives, this partnership allows the Library and the other institutions to pool resources to maximize the efficiencies in a new system. By collaborating on a shared platform, McGill students, faculty and staff will gain greater access to partner libraries’ resources and the Library will benefit from the insight from the experience of fellow Quebec colleagues and experts.

Project status

• 2018-2019: McGill upgraded the existing WorldCat Local online catalogue and search tool to its successor WorldCat Discovery (managed by OCLC WorldShare Management Services.
• 2019: BCI and a coalition of Québec universities launched GeoIndex and Dataverse and selected OCLC's WorldShare Management Services (WorldCat) as the preferred library library services platform (LSP). This is the same platform that McGill upgraded to in 2018-2019.
• Summer 2020: A unified catalogue bringing together resources from all 18 institutions begins to be implemented in phases. As a result of the staggered roll out of McGill's WorldCat Discovery and the LSP, certain McGill lending and circulation policies and procedures will change to reflect the new consortial agreement.

For more information on lending and circulation changes at McGill, please visit the project page here.

Questions? Please email sharedplatform.library [at] mcgill.ca