Posts tagged under: Research

Open content: where we are and where we’re going

open_road

Last year during Open Access Week, I wrote to you to encourage your participation in our Open Content Survey. The timing was fortuitous, as there was (and is) a great appetite for understanding the evolving open content landscape and what it means for libraries. At OCLC, we were forging ahead with research, product development, MARC proposals, publisher agreements, and more. All with the goal of enhancing the visibility and accessibility of open content for library users. You can learn more about responses to the Open Content Survey in this results summary, and watch a recording of our “Works in Progress” webinar, “The Shift to Open at University and Research Libraries Worldwide.” In this webinar, my colleague Titia van der Werf (Senior Program Officer, OCLC Research) shares more results from the study.

Now it’s Open Access Week 2019, and over the last year we’ve made some excellent progress.

Read More

Reenergize your marketing strategy in three simple steps

2019-03-27_Marketing-Strategy

Having worked in public libraries of all sizes for the past 15 years, I’ve found there’s one common thread. Actually, there are many, but one really critical thing stands out. We don’t toot our own horn nearly enough, yet marketing always seems like an easy target to kick off our overflowing to-do list. And while we’re generally great planners, when it comes to marketing, we’re not always the best implementers. This is why I wasn’t surprised that 40 percent of public libraries have a communications strategy, but only 17 percent keep it current.

Read More

What is the top novel of all time?

lib100_next_banner

What is the top novel of all time? War and Peace? Moby Dick? Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? Dream of the Red Chamber?

The answer is, of course, “it depends.” It depends on your definitions and measures. Sales? Number of copies published?

One way of measuring is to look at library collections. Libraries reflect popular interest. However, they also reflect scholarly and cultural interest over time. Libraries are where the world’s literature is stewarded and defined.

Read More

Linked data in libraries: From disillusionment to productivity

data header graphic

I’ve been talking about linked data a lot lately. Before you say, “Oh, that’s so five minutes ago,” let’s frame linked data technologies and principles as a technology trend in libraries that continues to get (and deserves) extra attention. I’m naturally skeptical when libraries try to apply new technologies to long-solved problems, but I am now thoroughly convinced that the library needs linked data platforms. It’s one of our last chances to embark on innovations that we’ve known for a long time are not possible with the increasingly arcane and anachronistic MARC record.

It’s not always easy to see “what’s in it for me?” in linked data, so let me attempt a view from the many rocks we stand on.

Read More

An “open” discussion

open

What does “open” mean? There’s a general acknowledgment among librarians, publishers, and various funding bodies that the term “open” describes a complex continuum, rather than defining a specific set of criteria when used to describe items in our collections.

What has become entirely unambiguous, though, is that libraries are now expected—by researchers, funders, faculty colleagues, and especially end-users—to provide services that support open materials and workflows as fully as any other kind of content.

OCLC Global Council delegates work on behalf of the OCLC membership to reflect the needs of member institutions. At their meeting this past March, delegates expressed their strong interest in additional focus around this issue. With their advice, we established a cross-organizational work team to benchmark current OCLC activities and investigate new ways to support the library community throughout the Open Access (OA) life cycle.

Read More

Meet your guide for an Amazon journey: a librarian

librarian_guide

This last July, Forbes published an essay that suggested Amazon stores could replace libraries. The piece was pulled down within a couple days, after nearly 8,000 comments on Twitter and a great many response pieces suggesting that this wasn’t even a bad argument, but “twaddle.” These responses emphasized the role that libraries play in providing services (beyond just books) to people who otherwise might not have access to them.

Some recent library user research we conducted in partnership with the Worthington Libraries in Ohio suggests that these criticisms of the Forbes piece don’t go far enough. Not only isn’t Amazon a replacement for libraries, but our statistical models indicate that library use supports commercial book sales as well as other social and retail activities.

In short: if you want to look for more customers for your online book business, look in libraries.

Read More

To keep people happy … keep some books

2018-01-19_ContactDay

At the 2017 Dutch Contact Day last October, we heard how staff at the library of the Free University of Amsterdam is going to renovate their library space. One request students made? Surprisingly (perhaps), they wanted books around them. Not just because of the information that physical books provide, but because of the atmosphere and comfort they provide. So, the library kept the books as part of their renovation.

This may seem counterintuitive in our digital world as more and more of our experiences happen online. And it raises a few questions: What role does the physical library play in a digital world? And what makes people still want to come to this place?

Read More

Happy 350th birthday, Jonathan Swift!

swift_banner

Writing about the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, George Orwell observes:

“In a political and moral sense I am against him, so far as I understand him. Yet curiously enough he is one of the writers I admire with least reserve, and Gulliver’s Travels, in particular, is a book which it seems impossible for me to grow tired of… If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver’s Travels among them.” 1

On this, the occasion of Jonathan Swift’s 350th birthday, we share Orwell’s enthusiasm for Swift and his work by adding our own library-style tribute: Swift is the most popular Irish-born author, and Gulliver’s Travels the most popular work by an Irish author, in library collections today.

Read More

It’s time to reinvent the collective collection

2017-10-10-It's-Time-to-Reinvent-the-Collective-Collection

This year, we are celebrating the cooperative’s 50th anniversary. In 1967, the Ohio library community changed the way they worked together to share their catalogs. It was truly a reinvention of cataloging, resource sharing and library discovery.

Today, as we begin our next 50 years, we are at another turning point that requires a new, even bolder vision. We are building on WorldCat, now the definitive global library collection, to provide library members, groups and regional and national partners even greater capacity to build, manage, and curate the collective collection.

Read More

Visitors and residents: different roads, different maps

2017-02-21 Visitors and Residents Roads and maps1

“The map is not the territory.”

That phrase is probably the best-known quote of Alfred Korzybski, the famous Polish-American semantic scholar. He was making the seemingly obvious point that the words we use to describe something are not the thing itself. Nor does a description change the thing itself. Why does this matter? Well, the more layers of abstraction we put between ourselves and actual things, the harder it becomes to relate them back to the “nonverbal domain” as he called it. We can fall down a rabbit hole of concepts and constructs that, while interesting, may not be, well…useful.

That’s why, as we’ve spread the word about our “Digital Visitors and Residents” work, I’ve been gratified to see librarians and institutions look at our tools not as clever metaphors or abstractions. Instead, they are using them in a variety of ways to make real, valuable changes in how they interact with their library users and potential users at the point-of-need.

In short, as long as you look up from the map often to take in your surroundings, it can function as a useful guide rather than

Read More