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OCLC MEMBERS COUNCIL
Kevin Furniss


The October 2005 OCLC Members Council meeting was called "Partnerships: Building and Expanding the Collaborative". The following report includes topics discussed at the various meetings that should be of interest to OLAC members.

Topic 1: Cataloging Strategy

Bob VanVolkenburg, Director, Cataloging Products & Services, provided an overview of the cataloging environment that informed the strategy: fewer catalogers and reduced budgets; little growth in print materials acquisitions; and increasing e-resources, not necessarily cataloged. From this four main themes emerged:
  1. Increased automatic delivery of cataloging through
  2. More scripts/language support: grow WorldCat in both database size and membership
  3. Metadata support for e-content
  4. Continue to deliver value through
David Whitehair, Cataloging Consulting Product Manager, reviewed projects either currently under way or being planned that will implement this strategy. These include: Discussion by the committee included concern for the quality of WorldCat as a result of vendor partnerships, while others supported this effort. Concern was expressed for getting records/metadata into WorldCat as early as possible. A committee member asked if RFID meant the death of the bar code. Others indicated that currently this is cost prohibitive, and another mused whether there will be enough physical materials even to worry about this.

Topic 2: Content Cooperative Concept

Charly Bauer, Product Manager, Collections & Archives, Digital Collection Service, described the Content Cooperative pilot which will allow libraries and other cultural heritage institutions to upload digital objects to the Digital Archive and attach links for this digital content to a WorldCat record using the Connexion interface. This content will then be accessible via FirstSearch or OpenWorldCat. The pilot, scheduled to begin March 2006, will determine the feasibility of integrating digital content management with cataloging to increase the visibility of unique library content.

Topic 3: FRBR in Action and Implications for Cataloging

Dawn Hendricks, Content Models Product Manager, and Bill Brembeck, Open WorldCat Product Manager, provided an overview of how FRBR concepts are being applied to FirstSearch WorldCat and Open WorldCat results. Dawn explained that they used the OCLC Research FRBR model which combines records based upon author and title, uses existing bibliographic records, OCLC Authority file for variant forms of access points, and pulls together a family of works for all editions, all formats and all languages. The system organizes results "on-the-fly" into works records so that the searcher gets only what they requested, but the search can be expanded. System performance is a concern, since it can take a long time to organize the results. Dawn then showed examples of FirstSearch results before and after FRBR was applied. Committee members provided reactions and suggestions for improvements of the displays, including making the fact that "Your library owns this" more prominent in the display. The committee also suggested that OCLC should consider filtering the results based upon the country where the search originates and displaying the appropriate cover art for that country rather than the most widely held. Mark Scharff from MOUG provided suggestions for improving the display for musical works, including making the composer’s name more prominent in the display. The committee also asked if OCLC is confident about use of uniform titles for FRBR collocation. Dawn explained that it is using not only uniform titles, but also the statement of titles. Additionally, OCLC Quality Control staff is performing significant clean-up work on both authority and bibliographic records in support of this project.

Bill Brembeck then provided a brief overview of Open WorldCat, stating that currently 3.4 million records have been indexed by Yahoo and Google, with plans for WorldCat to be available via an entry portal page. He then summarized the Open WorldCat FRBR view, explaining why it is different than the FirstSearch view. Open WorldCat is seen as more of an end user view and FirstSearch more of a librarian view. The Open WorldCat has an "Editions" tab that shows all formats available. They are also working on plans to internationalize the results, recognizing the geographical area from where the user is searching. Committee members’ feedback included the need to standardize the views between Open WorldCat and FirstSearch. They also urged that OCLC continue to usability test these changes with all types of end users.

Glenn Patton, Director, WorldCat Quality Management, was scheduled to speak on the implications of these developments upon cataloging, however, because of time constraints, his part of the discussion was deferred.

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Last updated: April 4, 2006
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