The OCLC-AMICAL RESPOND project: Leveraging WorldCat to connect international American universities.

AMICAL is a consortium of American-modeled, liberal arts-oriented universities in Central and Western Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Russia. AMICAL members - who share educational frameworks, use of the English language, and key elements of their institutional missions - are trying to collaborate on the development of their library and information services and their curricular resources. In partnership with OCLC, AMICAL is implementing a pilot project called RESPOND (Resource Sharing Project for Network Discovery) in order to make AMICAL libraries' holdings more visible to each other and to the world, to help them analyze their collections, and to increase their ability to fulfill ILL/DD requests using library resources worldwide. By partnering with OCLC and leveraging WorldCat and other existing infrastructure, RESPOND has been able to introduce a wide variety of related services in a relatively short time. The newness of all these services, as well as libraries' diversity of locations, languages, and professional practices, has introduced many challenges. Benefits will be measured over the coming year as libraries experiment with the integration of RESPOND services into their workflow, but indirect effects such as increased communication and general cooperation are already appearing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]