Future Search

Technical Services

Master Class

Karen Calhoun Glenn PattonVP Metadata, OCLC Director, WorldCat Quality

Marion van Brunschot Lars SvenssonManager, Acquisitions & Metadata IT Specialist

University of Amsterdam Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

EMEA Regional

Council

Meeting

2 March 2011

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Future Search Conference Set Up

Warzynski, Chester C. 2004. "Future-Search Conferences at Cornell

University“ New Directions for Institutional Research. (123): 105-112.

Typical Future Search Questions

• What are the most significant trends in the environment?

• How can we prepare to address them?

• What are some issues we need to acknowledge and

address?

• What communities do we serve?

• What do these communities need from us?

Outline of Master Class

• OCLC strategic planning for metadata services

• Environmental scan: Sketch of most significant trends

• High level view of OCLC plans: technical services to metadata

management

• Deeper investigations of certain issues or trends

• Metadata quality – who uses library metadata, and what are

their needs? (Glenn - WorldCat case study)

• Redesigning workflows (Marion - University of Amsterdam)

• Innovation in knowledge organization (Lars - DDC as linked

data, DNB)

What’s the first thingyou think of when you think of a library?

Some issues to acknowledge and address

De Rosa, Cathy. 2005. Perceptions of libraries and information

resources: a report to the OCLC membership. Dublin, Ohio:

OCLC Online Computer Library Center. p 3-32.

http://www.oclc.org/reports/pdfs/Percept_pt3.pdf

De Rosa, Cathy, et al. 2011. Perceptions of libraries, 2010:

context and community : a report to the OCLC membership.

Dublin, Ohio: OCLC. p. 38.

http://www.oclc.org/reports/2010perceptions.htm

Books = ~85% of member-contributed

WorldCat bibliographic data

WorldCat by Type of Material Described,

1999-2010

E-books/books

2009: 1.8%

2010: 2.9%

Brief summary of the results of our

environment scan -1-

1. Collections of interest to the communities that libraries

serve go well beyond the physical collections that are

housed in library buildings

2. Available cataloguing services (including OCLC’s) were

built to support conventional title-by-title library

workflows for physical library collections, with limited

support for new metadata creation and management

methods for new types of collections.

WorldCat Cataloging Partners

WorldCat Collection Sets

• Save staff time and expense of

cataloging hundreds or

thousands of titles

• MARC records for vendor sets

of microform and electronic

collections ready to load

• Holdings automatically set in

WorldCat

Environmental scan results -2-

3. Academic libraries have significantly increased their

spend on e-resources, which are heavily used; metadata

for e-resources is often obtained and managed at the

collection level (not title-by-title)

4. Libraries have redundantly built complex and costly local

infrastructures for e-resource management, including e-

resource metadata management

5. Alternative methods for metadata creation and

management do exist but they are not part of shared,

network-level, cooperative cataloging services

Environmental scan results -3-

6. Digital library collections and open access repositories

are growing in number, visibility, relevance and use

7. The metadata for digital library collections and open

access repositories is not aggregated or managed in any

systematic way on the network that would offer libraries

a way to cost-effectively aggregate this metadata with

other library collections

8. Open source, open data, and open access solutions have

wide support and acceptance in the library community.

If we were building a cooperative,

network-level metadata creation and

management service today, what would

it look like?

A Five Year Vision For OCLC Metadata

Management and Collections Services

• A new WorldCat: representing physical, licensed, and digital

library collections

• Innovation through more open data and services

• Easier, faster ways to ingest an OCLC member’s or group’s

data and keep it synchronized with WorldCat and syndicated

on partner sites (e.g., Google Book Search)

• Functionality to efficiently create, manage and share

metadata both at the collection level and at the level of a

single information object

-CONTINUED-

Five Year Vision -2-

• Continuous improvement in quality and cohesiveness of

WorldCat data for metadata experts, end-users and a variety

of other constituencies (more from Glenn)

• A service-neutral open platform (more in another program

from Robin Murray)

Member Libraries’ Collective Collections

WorldCat bibliographic

records

1.6 billion holdings

WorldCat

WorldCat.org

WorldCat Local

WorldCat Knowledge Base

Google Books, HathiTrust,

OAIster

Local special collections

Open access repositories

Digital Collections Gateway

Physical holdings

of libraries

Licensed e-content Digitized and born digital

content

1. Build the New WorldCat: Representing Physical,

Licensed, and Digital Library Collections

2. Enable more access to WorldCat to

spur innovation

• WorldCat Rights and Responsibilities for the OCLC

Cooperative - applies to copies of WorldCat data in other

systems http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/recorduse/policy/default.htm

• WorldCat data in WorldCat - expose through a

standardized and consistent set of data services and

interface mechanisms. These mechanisms include

syndication, Web-service / API access and linked data.

Early examples of WorldCat data sharing

• Data syndication – particularly to the internet search engines. Get more

attention for library collections.

• WorldCat API - has seen a 20-fold increase in traffic in the past year and now

generates around 5 million transactions per month.

• WorldCat Knowledge Base API –provides programmatic access to the

knowledge base

• The XID services - provide identifier mapping between related ISBN’s and

ISSN’s (generates around 5 million transactions per month from external

services).

• The Dewey linked data service (http://dewey.info)

• VIAF linked data service

• More on this topic: Robin Murray blog post on the open data ecosystem:

http://community.oclc.org/cooperative/author/robin_murray/2010/12/

3. Making data ingest easier – for every type

of collection

Currently, it is expensive and complex for

libraries to represent their collections in

WorldCat. OCLC Research calls this the ―stitching

cost.‖

There is a need for solutions that reduce the

stitching cost to near zero.

Improve data ingest

DefinitionFoundation for data ingest and exchange between

OCLC services, members and partners.

Key Feature

Ingesting or harvesting holdings and metadata

Library

Impact

Efficiency: Easier synchronization with WorldCat

Visibility: More ways for the library’s users to find the library’s collections

Data

Ingest

Synchronizing ―Group‖ and ―Local‖ Catalogs

with WorldCat

CBS Union Database

SRU

Central Library

District Library

Tech School Library

SRU

Territory Library

Design School Library

Other solutions for (mostly) physical library

collections

Traditional Library System

Z39.50 Client

SQL Query

OAI PMH

ILS API

Local Scripts

SRUILS

Synchronization Gateway

WorldCat Knowledge Base: network level e-

resource management (including metadata

management)

• Collection data of

databases or packages

•Title data and identifier

metadata

•Holdings data inventory

of titles subscribed to by

your library or consortia

•Linking logic

6.3m records for e-materials from 125 providers in 9 countries

Independent of any particular application

OCLC Digital Collections Gateway – metadata

aggregation and discovery for digital library

collections

A Web-based, no-fee, self-service tool to contribute digital

repository metadata to WorldCat

OAI (Open Archives Initiative) compliant repositories

(available since July 2010)

Discovery in WorldCat.org,

WorldCat Local

―The function of searching across

collections is a dream frequently

discussed but seldom realized at a

robust level. This paper …

discusses how we might move

from isolated digital collections to

interoperable digital libraries.‖

—Howard Besser

4. Collection Builder: Provide for metadata

management at the collection level

DefinitionInterface that allows libraries to select their content and service

providers and configure services so that OCLC can deliver metadata and updates at the collection level

Key FeatureCollection-level metadata management for physical, licensed, and

digital content

Library

Impact

Reduces complexity; lowers costs; improves user experience with library systems and services

5. Improve the quality and cohesiveness

of WorldCat data for end users and

librarians – around the world!

• Glenn’s presentation on WorldCat Quality is next

• The wealth of data from other countries is also an

unprecedented opportunity to create new, multilingual

services around works, names, terminologies, the DDC, and

more

Ap

plic

ati

on

Pla

tfo

rmD

ata

Management Environment

Data Ingest Platform

End User Environment

Data Layer

Business Logic

Services

Core Data Services

Registry KBWC WorldCat Identifiers X-ID …

Management ApplicationsEnd User Apps

Licensed Supply Chain Digital Supply ChainPurchased Supply Chain

6. An open, service-neutral platform

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Robin Murray

VP, Global Product Management

“OCLC’s Open Platform

Strategy”

Plenary Session

3 March 2011

8:50-10:15 am

CBS (Central Bibliographic System) Partners

and WorldCat

•Support strong frameworks

for national or regional

union catalogs

•Loading in WorldCat gives

more visibility to citizens,

students and scholars

around the world

•Automated data

synchronization and

syndication

GGC (Netherlands)

UnityUK

GBV (Germany)

Hebis (Germany)

BSZ (Germany)

ABES (France)

Libraries Australia

SwissBib

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Summary of Plan

Serve the whole cooperative

• Continue to serve individual libraries, national libraries, regional service providers and consortia; offer a service-neutral open platform.

• Libraries will participate in multiple consortia and their metadata needs will be multi-dimensional.

Build the new WorldCat

• Represent physical, licensed and digital library collections

• Evolve data exchange, representation models and policies to support a more distributed, open metadata environment

• Make data exchange easier

Improve WorldCat quality

• Global perspective; multilingual services

• Address issues of duplication and holdings scatter

• Improve the WorldCat Registry and Knowledge Base

Add value

• Transition from a record supply service to a collections metadata management service

• Revitalize the online cataloging service (not discussed today!)

• Significantly increase multilingual services --names, terminologies, DDC, more