Posts tagged under: Discovery


Engage faculty and students with digital collections

There are almost as many reasons for digitizing library collections as there are collections themselves. Public libraries may do so to curate and promote unique local history or culture. Museums, of course, want to make their treasures available for study and enjoyment to people who can’t visit the physical building. And while academic libraries have just as many, varied reasons for beginning a specific digitization project, there’s often a longer-term goal in mind: to promote study and learning around the collection.

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Libraries and open access discovery

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Co-author: Titia van der Werf

The theme of this year’s Open Access Week is “Community over Commercialization.” It’s designed to “encourage a candid conversation about which approaches to open scholarship prioritize the best interests of the public and the academic community—and which do not.”

This is an important theme for OCLC. As a membership organization that doesn’t return profit to shareholders or private owners, our sole focus is on supporting libraries. This means that finding ways for libraries to provide better access to open content is a priority. One effort underway right now is the Open Access Discovery project in partnership with two Dutch library consortia—Universiteitbibliotheken en Nationale Bibliotheek (UKB) and Samenwerkingsverband Hogeschoolbibliotheken (SHB).

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Can you imagine a world without WorldCat?

WorldCat is a legend—a remarkable achievement in global collaboration. What began as a way for a handful of academic libraries in Ohio to distribute the cost of cataloging has turned into a critical, core asset for libraries around the world.

WorldCat is not just a place for individual libraries to write and store MARC records. Collaboration among our metadata experts, libraries, and many partners has evolved WorldCat to the point where it is a hub for an astonishing volume of library activities every day. The one thing that hasn’t changed is our global, community commitment to ensuring that high-quality, library-centric data is available now and in the future.

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The new WorldCat.org expands the impact of libraries everywhere

Seven years ago, I was the director of e-commerce development for a global brand with more than $USD 2.5 billion in sales, 500 stores, and nearly 12,000 employees. Then I found WorldCat.org.

It was love at first search as I’ve always been a superfan of libraries. I saw the fundamentals of my chosen career—improving online services, intuitive interface design, and an exceptional user experience—put to use in the service of libraries. That moment moved me to join OCLC.

Today I can say, without hesitation, that our recently rolled-out work to reimagine, redesign, and rebuild WorldCat.org has been the highlight of my career.

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Global library discovery and fulfillment: How we’re the same and how we differ

When we presented last year’s Global Council report on access to open content, we got a lot of great feedback. Both from Council delegates—who reported that it exceeded their expectations—and from our membership and the library community in general. The report provided insights on an important topic that hadn’t been explored in that way before: to gain a collective global understanding of the activities, investments, and efforts libraries are engaged with around open content. This report is just one of the ways that Global Council works on behalf of libraries by gathering insights each year to help inform the profession and OCLC on topics of importance to the library profession.

This year Global Council sponsored a survey to gather “Global Perspectives on Discovery and Fulfillment,” with a goal of gathering enough information from each of our three geographic regions to be able to make statistically significant comparisons if and when possible. I’m pleased to share that we hit that mark and can report back on a few interesting differences.

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To the rescue: How academic libraries can support humanities monographs through open access

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When we think about open access (OA) publishing in academia, it’s very often about articles. That is, relatively short, data- and research-focused pieces in peer-reviewed journals. Trends in open science, public funding, cost containment, and library collection development have driven a lot of those conversations, and they’re important.

Today, though, I’d like to talk about the scholarly monograph. Book-length content published as a stand-alone work is not the norm for many of the hard sciences. But it is often the end result of important work done in the humanities, liberal arts, and social sciences—and often required for tenure and promotion in those disciplines.

The trends we’re seeing in OA for article-level materials are very promising. But they also often work against monograph publishing, which is not good for academic presses working in the humanities.

There is an opportunity here, however, for academic libraries to engage in OA publishing to promote and protect the work being done by their humanities scholars.

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