As the new Executive Director of Metadata and Digital Services, I’m honored to have the chance to work alongside a community of library professionals who believe strongly in improving access to information for all. I’m also thrilled to work with our robust, networked services and proven technology across a global footprint. And I’m proud to join an organization that has supported richer discovery experiences for decades by creating, maintaining, and promoting cooperative and trusted data.
We’re being inundated with data. That’s what we’re told, right? We hear all the time how many exabytes of new data are being created every day. There’s just one problem: maybe none of it is the data we actually need.
I recently had the opportunity, along with several of my OCLC colleagues, to attend the Electronic Resources and Libraries (ER&L) Conference. I’ve been going to this great conference for the last two years, and each year it offers a really valuable look into how libraries manage e-resources. This year, several topics across multiple presentations led me to the conclusion that actionable data is actually pretty hard to find and even harder to wrangle successfully.
You can find links to thousands (maybe millions) of recipes using the WorldCat Cookbook Finder. And it’s the work of many, many catalogers over 50 years that makes that possible, of course. The metadata entered into WorldCat is what powers the Cookbook Finder and many other library services.
But can you find an actual recipe within those 394 million bibliographic records?
For one (or more?) brief times during OCLC’s history, yes you could.
And today? Well … read on to find out!
Picture if you will an American public library. Any library will do. A smartly dressed, clean-shaven man in his mid-40s approaches the reference desk.
“Can I help you find something?” asks the librarian.
“Yes,” says the man, “I’m looking for a copy of Bats and Bones, a Frannie Shoemaker Campground Mystery.”
“Let me see if I can find that for you,” says the young woman behind the desk as she checks FirstSearch.
“Just one thing, please,” asks the man as he waits. “I’m looking for a specific edition.”
Scrolling past titles, the librarian says, “Oh?” without looking up.
“Yes,” says the man. “I’m looking for the edition that will be published in the year 2102.”
[Cue creepy music.]
This library has entered…the Twilight Reference Zone.
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.
