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!
We often fight against the idea of being labeled by others. We don’t like people to make assumptions about us based on single aspects of our lives. Why is it, then, that we are so often excited to associate ourselves with causes, teams, groups, bands, artists and places using very specific labels? We display bumper stickers and wear T-shirts, pins and buttons with short, easily identifiable phrases that link us to ideas we find important.
Obviously, the difference here is that in one case someone else is labeling us, but in the other, we label ourselves, on our own terms, using our own personally selected metadata.
As a button aficionado, this subject fascinates me. As a librarian, it inspires me.
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 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.
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.
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.
“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.
