Sabina Pagotto

Today is the last day of OCUL’s VDX license. OCUL first talked about procuring VDX in 1999, named its installation RACER in 2002, and went live with the first cohort in June 2003. Now, 21 years later, RACER is coming to an end, and since I’m the current service lead at Scholars Portal, it sort of feels like I’m the one killing it.

When I first imagined writing this post, I thought I would end up talking about how humbling it is to be involved in sunsetting this service that’s been around for so long. Some of the people who were involved in its initial implementations are practically legends in OCUL, and there are a lot of staff who have been working in RACER since the very beginning, and who am I, really, to eulogize it?

But the more I started to think about it, the angrier I got. (I mean, angry about ILL is pretty much my default setting these days [sometimes I call it I-L-yelling], but not usually about RACER specifically.)

Earlier this year, we migrated our wiki from Confluence, which we’d been using since… 2007 maybe?… to Xwiki. As part of that migration, we had to go through a lot of old documentation and decide if it was worth keeping. And I spent way more time with all the VDX implementation documentation from 2002-2003 than anyone has in at least 15 years. So when looking for material about RACER’s early days to use when saying farewell, I knew exactly where to look. And here’s where my frustration started to bubble.

In 2000, when OCUL made its procurement decision, VDX and its ZPortal user interface were incredibly innovative. Best-in-class. “Probably the most capable ILL system available.” The implementation at OCUL was not without problems – and from the start reality didn’t always meet the starry-eyed expectations that you can get by watching vendors demo a slick product – but overall, VDX was an incredible success in OCUL. RACER became synonymous with resource sharing to the point that it was written into job descriptions. In 2017 Scholars Portal had a booth at the Congress for the Social Sciences and Humanities, and more than one person’s eyes lit up when they saw the RACER logo on our table. At a friend’s engagement party, her sister-in-law approached me and said, “Oh my God, I heard you work for RACER?? I could NOT have gotten through my PhD without it!”

But, despite the fact that OCLC decided about a decade ago to sunset VDX (and therefore developments and updates slowed down), they still don’t quite have a fully featured solution that longtime consortial VDX clients are happy with. Some VDX consortia have been migrated to Relais D2D or Tipasa, but those come with their own issues. Some other VDX consortia have a migration path towards Resource Sharing 4 Groups (RS4G), but progress on that appears to be moving slowly. Meanwhile in OCUL, we knew the Collaborative Futures project would result in a new shared Library Services Platform a few years before VDX’s final end date. But it took us a long time to get up and running with any resource sharing functionalities within the new platform, and Alma still can’t do some of the things we want.

So… this has ended up with us, here in 2024, still using a VDX that froze in time in 2014 for those last few things that we can’t do in Alma. Instead of the incredibly innovative software that it was when we started using it, RACER is now an old dinosaur with a user experience that really can’t stand up to more modern products. For the ILL staff, working in two systems for the past year has been exhausting and frustrating, while the prospect of losing VDX entirely and having to do cumbersome workarounds isn’t appealing either. We can’t fully remember RACER at its best, and we also can’t have a fully optimistic look forward to life without RACER.

I’ve been feeling a lot of things over the last few days/weeks/months as we approach the end of life of this service: sadness, anticipation, frustration, anxiety. And now we can add that bit of anger to the mix. I’m mad that the end of RACER’s life has tarnished its legacy. I can only hope that as time goes on and resource sharing solutions progress, we can eventually look back and remember RACER at its best.