Library and Archives Canada (LAC) yesterday launched Voilà, Canada’s new national union catalogue, hosted on the OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) website.
LAC has been working with the non-profit cooperative OCLC, a leader in library services, to implement a leading-edge library management system that will make the published heritage of our country more visible than ever before, and will share Canada’s culture and knowledge with the world.
LAC said the launch of Voilà marks the completion of the migration of the national union catalogue holdings from AMICUS to OCLC.
The new catalogue offers an intuitive interface with modern features for searching published materials located in hundreds of libraries across Canada that subscribe to OCLC services, or had their holdings migrated from AMICUS to OCLC.
LAC will start enriching Voilà to provide public access to its own holdings later this year.
Genealogy research
So, what does this mean to genealogists? Using keywords, you can search for family names and topics, such as “history” and “picton,” on Voilà to discover if any books or theses have been written on a topic that may interest you. From there, you can discover which libraries hold the books in their collection.
When I searched “scottish” and “montreal,” using the Advanced Search, I saw more than 1,900 results. Filters in the left margin allowed me to further narrow down the results. Under History & Auxiliary Sciences, you will find Genealogy. In most cases for me, Genealogy narrowed down the results too much.
What I like about Voilà is that theses are included in the search results. What I don’t like is that there is no link to the PDF of the theses. Since LAC manages the free Theses Canada Portal where theses are available online, it seems only natural to provide the link. I hope this will come in due time.
For more information on the project:
A new library management system to share Canada’s published documentary heritage
Questions and answers for Canadian libraries in light of LAC’s contract with OCLC
This would be a finding aide? I’d have to contact a listed library to see if it is available online? I’ve spent many hours at the Library and Archives Canada web site the past couple of weeks and found lots of stuff.
The online catalogue shows you where to find the publication. In most cases, I saw the book was available in hard copy only, not digitized.