Before I attended the opening day session of COSUGI there were already whispers of great things to come. The opening day presentation moved along quickly with grandiose statements and promises of change coming frequently. The excitement in the room began building.
Then SirsiDynix unveiled their Blue Cloud, which includes several web based products. I liked that. The Cloud Based Client was explained, and since they are beginning with the cataloging module I was very happy. But I was waiting for the much discussed demo. I was not disappointed.
As SirsiDynix demoed the cataloging client on the big screens I sat on the edge of my seat in anticipation. Watching as they pulled up the ILS bibliographic record, and then hit one button, the OCLC bib record was side by side in the ILS. I was beyond impressed.
Dragging and dropping one MARC tag from the OCLC bib to the ILS bib, the crowed was simply amazed. Then Sirsi-Dynix topped themselves, by pressing the merge button the brief ILS bib merged with the OCLC record to make a completed record. As is if that wasn't enough, they even added a 949 tag in the OCLC bib. As the bibs are merged the 949 tag becomes a completed item record and viola! You are left with an OCLC quality MARC record, and an automatically generated item record.
Watching this demo I realized this would mean no longer would we need to use Connexion to get MARC records from OCLC into Horizon. No export.dat files, no messing with browser pop-ups, no navigating from the Citrix drive to your hard drive, no import window, no mistrake file, no people feeling incompetent because one step of this complicated process went wrong.
The excitement in the room was palatable, the crowd began to clap, and I admit, I wiped away tears of joy from my eyes. Then Jonya leaned over and said now remember that’s Symphony. And with that I was deflated. But there is hope. Sirsi Dynix promises the same functionality will be available in Horizon, eventually.
