**Big Heads/OCLC Discussion Topics**

# June 22, 2006, 6:30-8:30 p.m.

**Hilton New Orleans Riverside, OCLC Green Suite**

Those present: Bob Wolven (Columbia); Karen Calhoun (Cornell); Nancy
Gibbs (Duke); Marilyn Wood (Harvard); Chris Cole (National Agricultural
Library); Dianne McCutcheon (NLM); Cynthia Clark (New York Public
Library) Arno Kastner (NYU); Sally Rogers (OSU); Lisa German (Penn
State); Katherine Farrell (Princeton); Jim Mouw (University of Chicago);
Michael Norman (UIUC); John Wilkin (University of Michigan); Peggy
Johnson (University of Minnesota); Beth Picknally Camden (University of
Pennsylvania); Robin Fradenburgh (UT Austin); Jane Penner (University of
Virginia); Joan Swanekamp (Yale); Karen Smith-Yoshimura (RLG); Phyllis
Spies, Chip Nilges, Bob Van Volkenburg, Glenda Lammers and Glenn Patton
(OCLC)

**1) Now that the RLG membership has approved the combining of OCLC and
RLG, what are your primary concerns? What advantages does this offer to
your institution? What should be OCLC's primary focus during the
transition (shorter term) and beyond (longer term)?**

Karen Smith-Yoshimura, Manager, Bibliographic Services at RLG, began
with some comments about the process of combining the two organizations
and the transition planning that is currently going on.

The group provided feedback on both shorter- and longer-term concerns.
In the shorter term, there are concerns about:

-   The timing of database migrations, especially for records with
    non-Latin scripts

-   The need to preserve RLIN record IDs

-   OCLC's matching processes for batchloading

-   Training for staff, especially in Connexion functionality for
    non-Latin scripts.

-   Maintaining access to local versions of records, especially for rare
    materials and archival and special materials

-   The potential loss of detailed holdings

-   The loss of access to some files of resource records (including the
    National Library of Australia)

Longer-term concerns include:

-   The future of digital and cultural materials programs

-   What won't get done at OCLC during the transition or will be done
    more slowly

-   Loss of direct contact with RLG staff who understand the needs of
    the RLG membership (both large academic libraries and smaller
    specialized collections)

The group wondered about what portion of the RLG Union Catalog will be
completely new to WorldCat. Karen responded that, of course, we won't
really know until we've completed the integration process but she
estimates that a quarter to a third of the 48 million records in the RUC
may be new.

The group also emphasized the need for as much communication as possible
during the transition, both to the group as a whole as well as to
individual institution. It was also noted that there would be benefit to
sharing information among the group as each institution develops their
own transition plans and schedules.

**2) Could OCLC provide an update on the WorldCat Selection service, the
new service based on the Integrated Tool for Selection and Ordering
(ITSO), developed by Cornell University?**

Bob Van Volkenberg, Executive Director, Cataloging and Metadata
Services, provided a brief update and indicated that the service is
expected to be released later this calendar year. He noted that OCLC has
agreements with several vendors and asked the group for their help in
expressing their interest in the service with vendors which they use.
Group members also expressed interest in being able to work with Amazon
and Barnes & Noble.

Preliminary information on the service is available at \<link\> and more
information will be added there as it becomes available. Webinars are
planned over the next few months. If you and your staff are interested,
please contact (David?)

**3) What's the status of OCLC's work with internet search engines,
including Google, Yahoo, Windows Live Academic, etc.? How are decisions
made about what content to provide? How does OCLC work with the search
engines to facilitate effective use of bibliographic data?**

Chip Nilges, Vice President, New Services, distributed a handout with
responses to the group's questions (attached to these notes) and
discussed OCLC's current activities and future plans. Group members
asked whether OCLC needs assistance in working with the various search
engines to insure that they understand libraries' interest in having
data exposed. Chip indicated that it varies from vendor to vendor and
said that OCLC is considering some kind of advisory group that might
assist in that effort.

In response to Chip's comments about the Worldcat.org project that will
make all of WorldCat available on the web, group members asked about the
change in economic model from protecting bibliographic data to making it
freely available. Chip noted that having a library's holdings
information exposed would still require a FirstSearch subscription and
that OCLC is working to be sure it's clear where the value to libraries
is created across a range of associated services. Group members
commented that it is essential that the transition from OCLC to the
local system (for detailed holdings and circulation status) and the
delivery of access to electronic content be as seamless and smooth as
possible. Several members expressed interest in working with OCLC.

**4) What is the current status of the OCLC eSerials Holdings project?**

Chip also distributed a written update on the project and its planned
transition from pilot to production service in July 2006 (see attached).

**5) What is new with the DLF/OCLC Register of Digital Masters? Is it
publicly available yet? What is the status of discussions to harmonize
the RDM guidelines with European practice? How are Big Heads
institutions using the registry?**

Glenn Patton, Director, WorldCat Quality Management, reported that OCLC
now has an agreement with the European Register of Microform and Digital
Masters (EROMM) and its parent body, LIBER, to exchange records
describing digital maters. He also reported on a meeting held in
Washington in May 2006 to discuss harmonizing the DLF requirements with
those of EROMM. Attendees representing both projects agreed on a minimal
set of required data that will meet the need to identify particular
aspects of a digital master and a harmonized requirements document is in
process.

OCLC is also moving ahead with plans to make a publicly accessible view
of the registry available via the DLF web site. That should be completed
in the next few months and an announcement will be distributed to the
Big Heads.

Members of the group wondered whether there were also plans to make the
registry records harvestable. This could facilitate automated
comparisons with an individual institution's catalog to assist in
selecting materials for digitization projects. It was also noted that
the work of the DLF/OCLC Working group is contributing to OCLC's
activities with the Google 5 digitization efforts as well as the Open
Content Alliance activities.

**6) Has OCLC considered a service to help libraries add non-Latin
script data to records in their local catalogs that might not contain it
(as you did as an option in the Wade-Giles/Pinyin conversion)?**

Glenn reported that OCLC already has some capabilities that could assist
in this area through its ability to provide output from a batchloading
project. It was also noted that this will also be part of discussions
with Backstage Library Works about the future of the Marcadia service.

**7) What is OCLC's current thinking about the impact of globalization
of WorldCat on the master record concept? Any thoughts of providing
multiple "views" of a record? Filtering based on factors like encoding
level? What might the impact of FRBR be on Connexion users?**

Due to a lack of time, this topic was not discussed. \[Note that, as
planning continues for providing access to individual institutional
records, these questions are being factored in.\]

**Handout on the Status of OCLC's Work with Internet Search Engines**

This year the Open WorldCat partner interface was redesigned and
enhanced to include: non-US translations of interface and holdings
display, xml harvest set for partners, FRBR, virtual reference, Buy It
program

**[Status on Current Partners]{.underline}**

![](media/image1.wmf)

**Traffic:**

Traffic averages between 4-8M referrals/month. With \~150k clicks to
library services (e.g. OPACs, ILL, and QP) from the OWC interface. On
May 27th OWC passed 120 million total referrals to the project since its
inception.

Since adding standard number linking late last year, we have seen a
rapid increase in traffic from different sites. Average linking to OWC
rose 64.7% from April to May with an average of \~28,000 referrals a day
from direct ISBN and OCLC \# links.

> Examples:

-   Santa Monica Public library

> <http://csmpl.smpl.org/uhtbin/cgisirsi/GnUCOA6xEL/MAIN/142460044/38/72/X/BLASTOFF>

-   Clark University

> [http://voyager.clarku.edu](http://voyager.clarku.edu/)

-   University of Calgary

> [http://thoth.lib.ucalgary.ca](http://thoth.lib.ucalgary.ca/)

-   San Antonio Public Library

> [http://sapl.sat.lib.tx.us](http://sapl.sat.lib.tx.us/)

-   University of Hawaii

> [http://uhmanoa2.lib.hawaii.edu](http://uhmanoa2.lib.hawaii.edu/)

-   LibraryThing

> <http://www.librarything.com/>

**[Highlights on Key Partners:]{.underline}**

OCLC and partners have ongoing discussions about what content will be
indexed in their site and how bibliographic data can best be utilized.
Technology and mission vary widely from partner to partner which
influences how data is implemented. Partners rely heavily on OCLC
product, technology and research groups to help them shape and optimize
how the data performs in their sites as they continue to learn and grow.

Google

> Google Search: uses a 4.4M record set that includes:

-   3M FRBR'ized records (represents 78% of WC holdings)

```{=html}
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-   .5M digital heritage collections and CONTENTdm and

-   .9M CRL records.

-   They will be switching to new XML set for their main index (with
    full 50M FRBR records) and non-us country holdings.

> Google Scholar: uses an XML set of the full 50M FRBR records.

-   GS will be adding xISBN to improve their book matching in Scholar in
    August which should increase traffic to libraries significantly. .

Microsoft Live

> Academic:

-   The record set includes approximately 500,000 theses and
    dissertations limited to the physical sciences at initial launch.

-   They will be adding another 3M books from the physical sciences and
    plan to add more books based on scholarly audience level after Live
    Academic beta test is complete.

-   They will expand to cover more topics and records over time.

-   Indexing records in main search engine is planned but not yet
    scheduled.

Yahoo

> Search Engine:

-   Today 3.5M records, legacy IDIF file (which does not contain country
    holdings).

-   Include 3M FRBR records and another .5M records including digital
    heritage collections and CONTENTdm records

> Their strategy has changed to emphasize social, but we are exploring a
> role for the consortium in products like Yahoo! Answers.

BookPage.com

-   Links to 'Find in a Library' from their Db of over 7000 books of
    online book reviews and author interviews

Amazon

-   Licensed a total of 5 M records for use in their catalog.

Grolier

-   Licenses access to WC matching custom queries from over 15,000
    articles in Encyclopedia Americana.

-   Discussing "custom bibliography" with other reference sites.

AccessMyLibrary

-   Linking agreement in place for Open WorldCat and AccessMyLibrary.

**Highlights for the next few months:**

-   Initial Worldcat.org release in August. More coming first quarter
    '07.

-   Affiliates site release in August

-   Open WorldCat Partner program:

-   expanding partner list including: social sites, publishers and other
    library partners

-   Continuing to add international holdings and translate interfaces

-   RedLightGreen site "sunset"

> The RedLightGreen site will be retired no earlier than the last
> quarter of 2006. RLG and OCLC will be able to communicate a more
> specific date at least 90 days before the shut down. Between now and
> retirement, OCLC will work to incorporate the key features that
> RedLightGreen users and librarians had identified as most useful into
> Open WorldCat/WorldCat.org.
>
> The worldcat.org team is working alongside the RLG team to ensure that
> popular features are a part of the new product.
>
> Especially:

-   Faceted search and browse

-   Citation formatting

-   FRBR and result sets

-   Ranking

> FRBRization of results: RedLightGreen used a FRBR-like approach to
> group works in RedLightGreen. OCLC is already employing a similar
> FRBR-like approach in Open WorldCat. Grouping of works is slightly
> different than in RedLightGreen; for example, titles in different
> languages are treated as separate works, and some of the multiple
> formats covered in Open WorldCat seem to fall into separate works (a
> movie of Twelfth Night may be a separate work since it has an
> \"author\" that\'s different than Shakespeare). (RedLightGreen only
> covers books.)
>
> Ranking: RedLightGreen orders results by a combination of relevancy to
> search term and how widely held a work is among contributors to the
> RLG Union Catalog. Open WorldCat already uses a similar approach,
> weighting the terms in certain fields and the currency of a work,
> along with how many holdings a work has.
>
> Faceted search: RedLightGreen offers uses faceted search on subject,
> author, and language. WorldCat.org will offer faceted search in the
> 1.0 release, scheduled for later this summer (the unspoken scheduled
> date is August 6th).
>
> Citation formatting: RedLightGreen offered a very popular
> bibliographic citation feature. OCLC has citation formatting in the
> WorldCat.org requirements for version 2.0, although the feature may
> not be included in the release (the unspoken scheduled date is for the
> very end of the calendar year).

**The OCLC eSerials Holdings Service**

**Update for the ALCTS Directors of Technical Services in Large Research
Libraries**

**June 2006**

**Chip Nilges, VP, OCLC New Services**

The OCLC eSerials Holdings service will be released on July 9, 2006.
Available at no extra charge to OCLC member libraries, the service:

-   Increases usage of electronic serials collections by making them
    more visible to searchers and ILL librarians at the point of need

-   Cost-effectively keeps electronic serials holdings up to date in
    WorldCat without adding to cataloging workload

-   Increases the value of library investments in A-Z lists, OpenURL
    resolvers, and in WorldCat

-   Enables libraries to automatically control and/or deflect ILL
    requests from colleagues in the OCLC cooperative

-   Helps bridge the gap between print and electronic materials

The service is part of an overall program to make WorldCat a
comprehensive registry of library objects and library services. OCLC
will proactively seeks out born digital and digitized content available
from publishers, authors, mass digitization projects and others, and
will automatically create MARC records in WorldCat representing those
resources, with links to the content and reciprocal links back to
libraries via the Open WorldCat program. OCLC will provide services to
libraries to automatically set and maintain holdings for libraries and
providers on those records to facilitate discovery and access to the
content.

OCLC is pleased to be working with service partners EBSCO, Ex Libris,
Serials Solutions and TDNet to increase access to libraries eSerials
collections, both for individual eSerials and those titles available in
aggregated databases. More partners will be added going forward. Through
the OCLC Online Service Center, libraries may order the service,
requesting their participating serials management provider to send their
holdings to OCLC monthly. OCLC will use this data to automatically set
and maintain ISSN-based journal title level holdings against 27,000
existing WorldCat MARC records monthly. The backbone of the service is
OCLC Openly Informatics knowledgebase of electronic content, which
continuously identifies eSerials records in WorldCat.

As part of the ordering process, OCLC will be assisting libraries to
register their OpenURL resolver and OPAC, if not already done, to
facilitate wider access to full text wherever available and at the point
of need.

For more information, please visit
[[http://www.oclc.org/eserialsholdings/]{.underline}](http://www.oclc.org/eserialsholdings/)

**[eSerials Holdings Pilot Results]{.underline}**

1.  35 pilot libraries participated in the pilot from June 2005 through
    June 2006

2.  Identified or created approx. 27,000 records in WorldCat for
    ISSN-based electronic serials using the Openly Informatics
    knowledgebase.

3.  400,000+ holdings are set & updated against this set of records for
    the 35 pilot libraries

4.  Real value for libraries identified in resource sharing and
    discovery

    a.  Increased fill rate from internal resources as ILL librarians
        discover holdings in WorldCat

    b.  Patrons and staff discover eSerials and link to the resources
        their resolvers/A to Z lists at the point of need

5.  The addition of automatic ILL deflection is very effective in
    reducing eSerials requests when activated

6.  The service is simple, efficient and very effective

**[eSerials Holdings Service Partners]{.underline}**

OCLC is pleased to be working with our partners to offer this service at
no cost to our mutual library service users. Each of these partners
participated in the pilot beginning in June of 2005 and we thank them
for their outstanding cooperation and for proceeding into production
with us.

**EBSCO:** Providing title-level holdings information for EBSCO A-to-Z
and LinkSource customers

**Ex Libris:** Service available to SFX v3 customers

**Serials Solutions:** Available to client libraries through the Serials
Solutions Client Center

**TDNet:** Available to TDNet Journal Manager and TOUResolver users

**[Future Plans]{.underline}**

-   Optional, subscription-based MARC record update service: Offered in
    the next release of the service in late 2006 or early 2007

-   Detailed holdings/Automated creation and maintenance of Local
    Holdings Records (LHR), available following introduction of the MARC
    record update service

-   Self-selection of holdings for libraries not using a partner
    service. Libraries will be able to select aggregated databases and
    individual journal titles to which they subscribe using the eSerials
    Web order form, and OCLC will set and maintain detail level holdings
    in WorldCat. Target for release is early 2007.

-   Additional partners will be added to the service as we move forward