Services

All digital products of the DLIR progam are freely available over the internet. The following services are provided to members of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers and their affiliates as an established framework for the creation of digital resources.

Cataloging assistance

The DLIR is a member of OCLC, a nonprofit membership and computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing the rate of rise of library costs. In OCLC's WorldCat, the world's largest and most comprehensive catalog, DLIR holdings appear with the symbol of AMODL. CAORC maintains a subscription that allows members, through a central coordinator, to use OCLC's WorldCat Quality Management Services for some cataloging tasks. These include the following:

  • Automated searching of OCLC's Worldcat for copy cataloging
  • Downloaded records from OCLC's Worldcat
  • MARC record creation for unmatched records.

Online catalog

The DLIR supports the maintenance of an online union catalog and an online public access interface (OPAC) customized for individual centers and affiliated partner libraries. The DLIR catalog (a Millennium system by Innovative Interfaces, Inc.), is shared with the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and maintained at CRL. It continues to grow rapidly as new materials are acquired and cataloged. This union catalog supplies centers with the opportunity to have an efficient research level catalog with little in-house effort.

Participation in grant-funded projects

Through its DLIR program, CAORC organizes multi-center projects and applies to funding agencies on their behalf to achieve specific goals, including these past projects:

  • American Overseas Digital Library catalog project established the DLIR union catalog at the University of Utah's Marriott Library and created procedures for submitting records (U.S. Department of Education, TICFIA program)
  • Retroconversion of Library Catalogs in the Middle East and Mediterranean Basin created almost 50,000 records for participating libraries (The Getty Foundation)
  • Mapping Mediterranean Lands cataloged map collections at centers in the Mediterranean region (U.S. Department of State, ECA)
  • Middle East Research Journals cataloged journals, created preservation microfilm, and digitized journals for online access at centers in the Middle East (Institute of Museum and Library Services)
  • JSTOR project provided low-cost or free access to the JSTOR journal archive for participating centers (Mellon Foundation and JSTOR)
  • DLIR Training (April 2008 : Chicago, IL) provided a 10-day library training program for representatives from 12 centers participating both in the JSTOR project and DLIR catalog (The Getty Foundation and CRL)
  • The Millennium project migrated the DLIR catalog from the University of Utah's Marriott Library to CRL where it shares an Innovative Interfaces, Inc. Millennium system. Individual OPACs were established for each participating library (The Getty Foundation and CRL)

Current projects

Services of the DLIR Project Coordinator

The DLIR Project Coordinator serves as a central project manager for funded projects, and as a single interface for management of the DLIR catalog with CRL's technical staff, OCLC/WorldCat services, JSTOR subscriptions, and the DLIR web site.