The library system powered by community engagement
OCLC Wise is designed around people, driven by data, and inspired by your community.
Uniquely holistic in its design, Wise combines the power of customer relationship management, marketing, and analytics with ILS functions. This transformative community engagement system empowers libraries to strengthen current customer relationships, build new connections with the wider community, and better meet changing community needs.
Community engagement that’s inspiring
You put your community at the center of everything you do. So does Wise.
Wise is designed around people—both library users and library staff—with the goal of delivering great experiences and enabling libraries to reflect their communities. This holistic system helps anticipate customer needs, reach them more effectively, and delight them with every interaction.
For years, many libraries have had to rely on multiple products to collect and analyze critical data. With integrated tools and shared data, Wise simplifies and automates this process. And the system doesn’t just collect usage data, it uses it to help evolve collections based on how they are used—or not used. In fact, Wise can replace many solutions libraries currently use individually because they are already integrated components.
Community engagement that’s intentional
Your goal is to build relationships that last. Wise makes it happen.
You likely have a lot of information about your customers. Are you using it? Can you even get to it? Wise makes it easy to track interests (like in a specific genre), allowing your community to decide what kind of information they want. And the integrated marketing component lets you target specific groups of people, so you can get the right message to the right person at the right time. People expect personalized experiences, Wise delivers with automation support that doesn’t weigh you down.
“I chose Wise because it connects us to our customers in a way that I haven’t seen before.”
Brigitte Blanton
Director, Greensboro Public Library
Community engagement that’s strategic
Your vision for the future reflects community needs. Wise can help.
A smart collection analysis and recommendation engine helps evolve collections to reflect the needs, consumption patterns, and preferences of the community. So, if there’s high demand for biographies at one location and a greater need for children’s books at another, the system helps optimize the collection over time to reflect those differences—at the branch level. Wise helps you make evidence-based decisions about how to grow or not grow your collection, redefine library space, and even how to improve programming.
“It’s very important to us that our collection and services reflect our changing communities. Wise helps us deliver on this promise by helping us better understand needs and with new ways to engage.”
Mark Fink
Executive Director, Anythink Libraries
Community engagement that’s insightful
You collect a lot of data. Wise puts it to work.
Wise improves back-office efficiency and uses key functions, like circulation and acquisitions, to analyze usage data (like how your customers use or don’t use your collection). As items are checked out, as purchases are made, and as items circulate, it identifies trends and delivers them in the form of a simple report that helps evaluate what to keep, buy, move, and weed.
You already have the data. But are you using it? This integrated approach turns that data into powerful insights for future planning, community conversations, improved marketing and communications efforts, and measuring library impact.
Increase impact of marketing campaigns
Target efforts for improved results.
Blasting a broad message to everyone on your email list likely won’t achieve much success. So, whether you’re hoping to build awareness about a new service, increase circulation, or get registrations to an event, a targeted approach will get you there faster. And based on experiences with other companies and organizations, many customers expect—and appreciate—a certain level of personalization.
Create, segment, and distribute the right messages.
Wise is designed to manage data securely (with library customer privacy in mind) and to provide opportunities to use data for more meaningful and effective engagement. The system simplifies the creation, segmentation, and distribution of personalized and targeted communications with a drag-and-drop solution. You can create automated campaigns that send messages using a variety of system triggers, such as a new registration, an upcoming renewal date, or a birthday. And it’s easy to pull together targeted lists using more than a hundred criteria, including transaction history, event attendance, areas of interest, and demographic information like age and branch location.
Control how and when to connect.
Wise empowers you to engage easily and actively with customers, connecting when it matters and at moments that are relevant to them. And the best part? How you use the Wise data and marketing capabilities is completely up to you. The marketing tools are fully integrated and available on any device.
As you continue to change to put your community at the center of everything you do, now there’s a system that does the same.
Meet changing community needs
We understand that selecting a new integrated library system is a major decision, and the research, review, and evaluation process is different for every institution. We have a team of Library Services Consultants who can help you get all of the information you need to make an informed decision.
Community engagement
Ideas and inspiration to build connections, grow relationships, and increase your impact.
Past events
Service availability
Available in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States (features differ by locale)