The LEONARDO online library system partnership is 14 years old today, October 27, 2008! Named "Leonardo" after Leonardo da Vinci in recognition of his renown in both the arts and the sciences, the Ameritech Horizon system was officially inaugurated on October 27, 1994.
This important partnership between the Spencer Art Reference Library (SARL) at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art with the Linda Hall Library of Science has resulted successfully in an online library system linking the holdings of two research libraries in Kansas City.
The partnership continues thanks to the special endowment fund established by both institutions. The online system has evolved during the 14 years through company changes, system upgrades, bibliographic network changes, and the hard work and dedication of the library staffs from both institutions, and at the Nelson-Atkins, with additional support from the IT department.
At SARL, LEONARDO provides for the public 24/7 access to bibliographic information about the 152,000 volumes in 10 languages: books holdings; journal volumes/ issues holdings; CJK character displays; auction catalog searching protocols; emailing lists; online reserve reading lists; and for staff in the building, self-checkout to offices.
Behind the public LEONARDO system, the library has a framework for acquisitions of monographs and serial publications, including payment history, and for item cataloging/metadata for each item according to national standards through the link to the international bibliographic network, OCLC (prior RLIN).
What’s next at SARL? The LEONARDO/OCLC systems will have soon a bibliographic description for the 96 unique document collections in the Museum Archives, one of the Library’s contributions to the 75th Anniversary Year of the Museum. These descriptions or collection-level records are constructed according to national standards. This opportunity opens up the Archives to discovery on the web via LEONARDO, OCLC, and Google. Researchers will still need to contact the Archivist and visit the Archives to consult the documents.
Happy Anniversary LEONARDO!