Public libraries of the French speaking community of Belgium make use of different Integrated Library management Systems (ILS); and until recently, no common portal was available to find a book. This situation recently changed: a portal of pubic libraries has been launched: Samarcande (1).

This portal is based on MoCCAM (2), an open source aggregator dedicated to library catalogues that complies to the following standards: MARC import (automated or manual), Z39.50 (search and server), OAI-PMH harvesting. It also offers other functionalities like keyword suggestion while typing a search ; record are recognised by Zotero, but as Webpage: some meta data like publisher are thus not imported. MoCCAM is to be compared to other software like VUFind (3), Blacklight (4). A free online version, Moccam en ligne (5) is also used by several libraries to download MARC records for import into their own ILS lacking Z39.50 connectivity.

Open source ILS are used by several Belgian libraries, but only few public libraries (6); Samarcande is thus a supplemental step towards use of open source software for online catalogues by Belgian public libraries.

Links

1. Samaracande library portal (in French) http://www.samarcande-bibliotheques.be/
2. MOCCAM (in French) http://www.moccam.fr/
3. VUFind http://vufind.org/
4. BlackLight http://projectblacklight.org/
5. MoCCAM en ligne (in French) http://www.moccam-en-ligne.fr/
6. Examples on the PMB Belgian User Group site (in French)  http://www.pmb-bug.be/?q=examples