Posts in topic: cataloging

More than maintenance: Four reasons to update holdings

Banner image for OCLC Next blog post: More than maintenance: Four reasons to update holdings. Image shows many different household and workshop tools that might often be used in maintenance

We do lots of maintenance tasks in our daily lives. We change tires, clean the HVAC, and inspect our roof and gutters—the list goes on and on. Usually, we do these things to prevent bad things from happening. But have you ever stopped and considered the benefits?

Holdings maintenance—making sure your library’s WorldCat holdings are accurate and up to date—is a good example of how important maintenance is. But there’s still so much more at play. In fact, there are major benefits for your library, your users, and the wider library community.

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Local decision support based on collective intelligence

Local decision support based on collective intelligence

Is there anything more thrilling than finding unexpected, useful answers during an information treasure hunt? While working on a shared print program years ago, I got the chance to use a variety of data sets and programming skills to uncover hidden strengths within library collections. It was important work. That knowledge helped showcase how each library contributed and revealed new ways to leverage collective materials.

The ability to use analytics tools to investigate relationships between the collections of many libraries and come away with actionable, local insights was exhilarating. If that sounds like your kind of treasure hunt, I have good news for you.

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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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How do you measure the value of cooperation?

OCLC Next blog header image: How do you measure the value of cooperation?

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.

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WorldCat knowledge base: A new infrastructure for e-resource management

worldcat knowledge base banner

The WorldCat knowledge base connects library users to the electronic content provided by their libraries. The latest update is the result of a major multi-year investment that strengthens OCLC’s foundation and provides benefits across many products and services. To learn more about this effort and our commitment to ongoing innovation, please watch a short video featuring Mary Sauer-Games, OCLC’s Vice President of Global Product Management.

Curious about how it works? Take a look at what’s inside WorldCat.

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The cat that didn’t bark

About a year ago, OCLC completed a two-year project (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) with the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) that, among other enhancements, added support for the registration of serial retention commitments in WorldCat. These enhancements not only help improve discovery of shared print data (PDF) across all OCLC services, but also bolster CRL’s Print Archives Preservation Registry (PAPR) and other partner efforts.

At the time that project was completed, we estimated OCLC and its member institutions would register about 15 million commitments over the course of the year. As of today, the community has actually added more than 25 million retention commitments.

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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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Time-traveling librarians, shared print, and being excellent to each other

There’s a scene in the movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure where they lament that they need some keys that were lost two days earlier. But because they have a time machine, they can just wait until later, go back in time before they’re lost, and leave them right next to where they are “now” for convenience.

It’s funny, of course. But also, kind of … smart. It shows that if you can count on someone doing something in the future, you can make current plans based on that knowledge. The trick is, each of us has to know what the other is planning.

Bill and Ted can rely on a future (and past) version of themselves to complete their plans. Library staff have to rely on shared data and common, agreed-upon signals across our collective collection.

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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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Five data analytics questions to help secure—or increase—your e-resource budget

5 questions

By Justin Parker, Subscriptions Manager, University of Manchester Library, and
Tim O’Neill, Electronic Resources Coordinator, University of Manchester Library

As Subscriptions Manager and Electronic Resources Coordinator at the University of Manchester, part of our jobs is to make sure the university gets the best deal on its e-resource investment. But what does “best deal” really mean? Does it mean the least expensive materials? Well, an inexpensive subscription isn’t a good deal if it isn’t used at all. And even free, open source content has a cost associated with the cataloging, discovery, and course management systems we use to make it available.

The challenge is to find better ways to assess the value our students, teachers, and researchers gain from the e-resources we provide. And the end result should be a better plan for accurately conveying the importance of library collections within the larger goals of the institution. But how do you get there? Having spent some time recently tracing the pathways of e-resource usage, we have a few suggestions.

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