Melvyl was the name of the online catalog of the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Franci ...

's library system. The Melvyl union catalog was produced by the

California Digital Library The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management a ...

— a unit within the department of Academic Planning, Programs, and Coordination at the UC Office of the President in downtown

Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...

. Melvyl was named after Melvil Dewey, the library pioneer who invented the Dewey Decimal System. Melvyl was supported by the OCLC's

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...

Local platform, which was retired in July 2021.

Overview

The Melvyl database contained over 30 million records from the: * ten UC campuses, * two UC Library storage facilities, the Southern Regional Library Facility (SRLF) and the Northern Regional Library Facility (NRLF), * and the

Center for Research Libraries The Center for Research Libraries (also known by its acronym, CRL) is a consortium of North American universities, colleges, and independent research libraries, based on a buy-in concept for membership of the consortia. The consortium acquires an ...

. Melvyl is a registered trademark owned by the Regents of the University of California.

History

Melvyl began as a library automation system in 1977. Merging

MARC Marc or MARC may refer to: People * Marc (given name), people with the first name * Marc (surname), people with the family name Acronyms * MARC standards, a data format used for library cataloging, * MARC Train, a regional commuter rail system o ...

records from the UC campuses into a

union catalog A union catalog is a combined library catalog describing the collections of a number of libraries. Union catalogs have been created in a range of media, including book format, microform, cards and more recently, networked electronic databases. ...

was first done in a

microfiche Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the original document size. F ...

format. Online access began in 1980 as a prototype for library staff. In 1981, library patrons were able to access an online electronic catalog of UC library books using a

computer terminal A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. The teletype was an example of an early-day hard-copy terminal and ...

. Since no network existed to connect the libraries of the nine campuses to the central site hosting the union catalog, options for a networking solution were analyzed, with

X.25 X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for packet-switched data communication in wide area networks (WAN). It was originally defined by the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT, now ITU-T) in a series of drafts ...

and

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

being considered. By 1984, a TCP/IP network linking the campuses using satellite technology was operational. At the time, Melvyl ran on a mainframe computer, and the UC Division of Library Automation performed development work to implement

in order to provide

telnet Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet contr ...

access. A

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

version was also later developed. The mainframe system, retired in 2003, was replaced using commercial software from the

integrated library system An integrated library system (ILS), also known as a library management system (LMS), is an enterprise resource planning system for a library, used to track items owned, orders made, bills paid, and patrons who have borrowed. An ILS usually is co ...

vendor Ex Libris. The legacy

mode was retired in 2007. The Ex Libris version was retired in June 2011 and Melvyl was then provided by OCLC's

Local platform. In March 2021, the UC Libraries announced that Melvyl would be retired as the UC Libraries migrate to a unified library catalog and discovery system (based on Ex Libris' Alma/Primo VE). In July 2021 the Melvyl site and brand was retired and the new systemwide integrated library system / library management system was launched. The new discovery system is called UC Library Search (Primo VE instances for each UC campus) with a systemwide Alma backbone.

References

External links

Melvyl catalog

Information on Melvyl

University of California Libraries in California Library catalogues Library automation OCLC Mainframe computer software {{Library-stub