Next Generation Melvyl Pilot – Important Milestone: Request

By Adam Brin, Technical Lead, Next-Generation Melvyl Pilot

An important milestone has been reached for the Next Generation Melvyl Pilot, supported by WorldCat Local.  As of March 2, 2010, the back-end of UC’s Request (Interlibrary Loan) service began running at OCLC for the pilot, rather than via current Melvyl.  Over the past months, UC CDL and campus staff evaluated the system by performing rigorous functional, performance, and end-to-end testing.  Campus ILL staff completed additional testing of the system. This work was done in addition to hours of testing and work completed by our colleagues at OCLC.  Each phase of testing has helped us build confidence about the new service.

• 350+ functional tests pinpointed each aspect of the process from matching specific items, resolving campus holdings, and filtering records by status and location to testing more complex cases such as monographic series.
• Performance tests placed extreme load on the system both in number of simultaneous requests and consecutive requests processed.
•  End-to-end testing exercised all of the major browsers, various campus connection methods (including webVPNs), and different sources of requests to ensure no degradation in service.
•  Campus testers introduced real-world problems into our existing tests and allowed us to test and re-test our assumptions.

In most cases, the pilot service operates on-par with the current Melvyl back-end, and in some it should actually exceed the current Melvyl functionality.  As with any release, we will continue to evaluate and monitor performance and quality after the installation, and work with ILL staff to uncover any problems.

On behalf of the WorldCat Local Implementation Team, we wanted to express our thanks to the CDL staff and campus colleagues who have accomplished this milestone.