Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)

Among the electronic library projects that the OCLC is currently involved in is the CIC Virtual Electronic Library (VEL), phase one of which was completed in July. Phase I, which has been developed in partnership with the US Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), has resulted in a new distributed system that provides a Web-based interface, links online public access catalogues of the CIC university libraries and allows users to initiate their own interlibrary loan requests. The software that is being used for the VEL is WebZ, which provides desktop access to more than 60 million books and 550,000 serials, as well as to the databases and digital systems owned or licensed collectively by the CIC's 12 major teaching and research universities.

The CIC and OCLC have agreed to suspend Phase II, which aims to include development of an independent client-serverbased interlibrary loan/document request system, until more research is done into distributed system technology and its application to resource sharing among large groups of libraries.