April 10 – 16 is National Library Week in the United States, an annual observance that has been sponsored by the American Library Association since 1958. In celebration of National Library Week, a few members of the OCLC team reflect on their career choices and today’s libraries in a five-part Next series.
April 10 – 16 is National Library Week in the United States, an annual observance that has been sponsored by the American Library Association since 1958. In celebration of National Library Week, a few members of the OCLC team reflect on their career choices and today’s libraries in a five-part Next series.
April 10 – 16 is National Library Week in the United States, an annual observance that has been sponsored by the American Library Association since 1958. In celebration of National Library Week, a few members of the OCLC team reflect on their career choices and today’s libraries in a five-part Next series.
I recently came across an excerpt from John Palfrey’s book, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google, in which he made passing reference to Geek the Library as a “clever online campaign.” Although the shout-out was certainly nice to read, the description gave me pause. The online piece of the campaign was only one small facet of the project. Truly, the vast majority of the activity and the outcomes happened at the grass roots, in nearly 1,800 communities across 48 US states.
Being smart is important. But it’s almost never the most vital quality for success at work. And in the library profession—which emphasizes intelligence even more than most—this focus can lead us to undervalue other essential traits.
Think back to a time in your work life that you remember very fondly. To a successful project or a team you truly enjoyed working with. To a story about your job you love to tell. Really. Take a moment and conjure up that situation, because I’m going to make a prediction:
Your memory has nothing to do with highly developed professional skills or intellect.
A little more than two years ago, OCLC introduced WorldCat Discovery. The goal was to combine the “best of both worlds” into one discovery service—to deliver a single service that would deliver full discovery of library collections and enable library staff and library users to continue searching the one-of-a-kind WorldCat database.
It was a good plan, and reflected a lot of input from our members at a variety of levels. One of the things that makes OCLC very different is our commitment to member involvement. Not just in terms of tactical, feature-focused feedback, but overall direction and strategy.
Like any plan, however, you often find out more in the execution than you do in the initial development stages.
I just got back from the OCLC EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) Regional Council meeting in Madrid, Spain. It was a great conference with more than 300 attendees from 31 countries. The theme of the event was “The Selfie Generation,” and you can see a ton of fun selfies and other pictures that our members, staff and guests took throughout the week.
At this meeting, OCLC members connected with each other and learned how library users’ needs and expectations are changing. We also had a chance to discuss OCLC services and research work and share what’s going on in members’ libraries and within their communities. This type of engagement stimulates lots of new ideas, encourages future-thinking and allows us to explore solutions together.
At OCLC Regional Council meetings like these, we also get to talk about something that’s unique to OCLC: member representation and voting—the power that OCLC members have to shape the future of the world’s largest library cooperative.
We used to bring all our learning, content and media resources to various “watering holes” where folks would gather to consume it. Classrooms, libraries, newspapers, magazines, TV networks, bookstores and record stores. Why? Because it was the fastest way to distribute a wide variety of materials. It wasn’t wrong. It made sense. But it also left us with embedded cultural and institutional ideas and biases about what learning is, who is involved in our workflows, what counts as “good enough” and even why we learn.
OCLC has been publishing bibliographic linked data since 2012. Since then we have published three major datasets as linked open data: WorldCat.org, WorldCat Works and OCLC Persons.
As we continue to work on creating and publishing linked data, a key goal is to demonstrate how this technology fits into library workflows and how it can add value for both librarians and users.
As part of this process, OCLC Research has used the recent work of Google Research as inspiration for the development of a Knowledge Vault pipeline. The focus of our effort is to develop a pipeline process that allows for the harvesting, extraction, normalization, scoring/weighting and synthesizing of knowledge from Authority files, bibliographic records and eventually resources from across the Web such as WikiData or user-contributed feedback.
I frequently get to talk to librarians from very different types and sizes of libraries. When I ask about their concerns, there is one refrain I hear consistently: “We’re being asked to do more with less.” When we dig into that sentiment a bit deeper, I usually find that:
Doing new things with fewer resources requires a paradigm shift. Why? Well, doing the same things with fewer resources can sometimes be managed through quantitative measures; trimming services, sharing costs, cutting back along the margins. But if you’re being asked to change both your input (funding) and output (services), that’s essentially a recipe for an entirely new way of thinking about how your organization needs to work.