Posts tagged under: Cataloging

Make your library a hub for open access content

The library that I am entrusted to manage, the Open Access Digital Theological Library (OADTL), has a clear mission. We aim to make high-quality, open access content in religious studies discoverable to the global community through a single, curated search experience. Even though it may seem like an unreachable goal, I bet you could write a similar mission for your institution.

Fill in the blank:

Our library is committed to making high-quality, open access content in [our area of expertise] discoverable to the global community through a single, curated search experience.

Feels good to imagine, doesn’t it? Well, I’m here to tell you how you can accomplish that goal with very little overhead cost and no increase in staff.

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The Music OCLC Users Group: You say you want an evolution

The Music OCLC Users Group (MOUG), the first and oldest of the OCLC cooperative’s user groups, has spent its 40+ year history working to improve access to music materials in libraries. Often that work has felt like an identity crisis as it sought to reconcile its cataloging-centric origins with its public services evolution. But the dedicated professionals associated with MOUG have kept at it over more than four decades because of the guiding notion that if you can make products and services function well for the complexities of music resources, they will work well for any resources.

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The Dewey Decimal Classification needs you!

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The editors of the Dewey Decimal Classification system have always collaborated with librarians to ensure the classification is up to date. Today, we’re excited to share changes that are making the editorial work on Dewey more transparent, inclusive, and responsive to community needs—and we need your help!

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A library collection of mysteries, murder and mayhem

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This Halloween, let’s take a peek into the Douglas County Historic Research Center (DCHRC) and try to uncover the mysterious connection between these seemingly unrelated yet terrifying clues:

  • A high-profile murder and kidnapping attempt in 1960
  • The burning down of a county courthouse in 1978 during a jail break
  • The near disappearance of local sheriff’s records in 2000
  • A list of every grave marker in town
  • Attics with mysterious, forgotten books

The common thread?

[Cue spooky music] Digital content management!!!

[Cue maniacal laughter]

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Celebrating 45 years of WorldCat

WC-45-blog-color-green[1]Ohio University’s Alden Library was the first library to use WorldCat to catalog a book online. It was August 26, 1971, the day the OCLC Online Union Catalog and Shared Cataloging System began operation. Catalogers at Ohio University cataloged 133 books online from a single terminal that day.

Our contribution and participation in the creation of WorldCat with the submission of the first record is an incredible legacy and an incredible part of our history. And what WorldCat has become in the 45 years since is just as extraordinary. It speaks to the dedication and the hard work of librarians everywhere.

I know firsthand that sense of dedication.

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Defending Differences from Duplicate Detection

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WorldCat is certainly the largest database of bibliographic data on Earth. Probably the universe, but let’s stick with what we know for sure. Among those 360 million bibliographic records, we figure there must be at least a few duplicates. In a database that size, built by tens of thousands of catalogers in thousands of institutions over the course of four decades, duplicate records are an unfortunate fact.

For most of those four decades, OCLC has also been hard at work trying to reduce the number of duplicate records through both manual and automated means. We began merging duplicates manually in 1983 and recently, specially-trained members of the Cooperative have been repliche orologi di lusso merging records as part of our ongoing Merge Pilot. From 1991 through 2005, OCLC’s automated Duplicate Detection and Resolution (DDR) software ran through WorldCat sixteen times, merging over 1.5 million duplicates. That original DDR dealt with books records only. We at OCLC were both painfully aware and constantly reminded of this limitation by you, our users.

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Putting linked data to work

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OCLC has been working a lot with linked data in recent years, and we have described some of that work at a very high level in this space before. That work continues, but now we are also adding an educational component to that work. Since we want our member libraries to be able to take advantage of all of the linked data that is becoming available—both from us and from the world at large—we want to help library software developers understand the tools and strategies for consuming linked data.

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Turning bibliographic metadata into actionable knowledge

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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.

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Getting started with linked data

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“Linked data” is a popular topic at library conferences these days, with overflow crowds wondering what it might mean for their institutions and their personal professional development. Why? Because linked data can be easily understood by computers, resulting in opportunities for improved library workflows, enhanced user experiences, and discovery of library collections through a variety of popular sites and Web services, including Google, Wikipedia and social networks.

Before briefly explaining the nuts and bolts of linked data, it is important to point out that for most libraries and librarians the sea change from records full of text strings to fully linked data elements will largely occur under your radar.

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