Farewell INNREACH, Hello WorldCat

It was just announced that the Orbis Cascade Alliance is moving its Summit union catalog to an OCLC platform.

This is great news and a truly bold move for the consortium considering how comfortable it has been using Innovative Interface's INNREACH product. Indeed, INNREACH, has served the Alliance well over the years.

The replacement product might sound a bit confusing: "a consortial borrowing solution based on the integration of WorldCat.org, VDX, WorldCat Resource Sharing and a new circulation gateway. " Here's a primer

• WorldCat.org is the search interface and global bibliographic database and can be scoped into group (union) and Local catalogs; the Alliance will be creating a group catalog that will act like a union catalog for its member's holdings, but some members may opt to buy WorldCat Local.
  
• VDX is a product that handles materials workflow between libraries
• The "circulation gateway" is a yet-to-be developed product by OCLC that will connect VDX to the circulation systems of various ILSs, in our case III
• WorldCat Resource Sharing is OCLC's system of moving ILL requests between libraries