Melvyl

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Melvyl is the name of the online catalog of the University of California's library system, and is a registered trademark owned by the University of California (UC). Melvyl contains catalog records from all ten UC campuses, as well as the two UC Library storage facilities, the Southern Regional Library Facility (SRLF) and the Northern Regional Library Facility (NRLF), as well as the California State Library, Hastings College of the Law, the California Academy of Sciences, the California Historical Society, the Center for Research Libraries, the Graduate Theological Union, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The database contains over 23,000,000 records. Melvyl is named after Melvil Dewey, the library pioneer who invented the Dewey Decimal System.

The Melvyl System is produced by the California Digital Library — an academic initiative of the UC Office of the President in downtown Oakland, California.

[edit] History

Melvyl began as a Library Automation System in 1977. Merging MARC records from the UC campuses into a union catalog was first done in a Microfiche 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. At one point, the Division of Library Automation maintained their own computer network that connected all the UC campuses, including some satellite links. Melvyl ran on a mainframe computer, and the UC Division of Library Automation did development work to implement TCP/IP in order to provide telnet access. A world wide web version was also developed.

The mainframe system, retired in 2001, was replaced using commercial software from the Integrated library system vendor Ex-Libris. A legacy telnet mode is still supported.