More cooperation enhances WorldCat [OCLC]

No.12
ISSN: 1559-0011
June 2009

More cooperation enhances WorldCat

Six-month experiment lets more librarians make changes to WorldCat master records

By David M. Duke

In response to requests from the library community, OCLC has introduced the Expert Community Experiment, a project that allows cataloging members with full-level authorizations more flexibility in making changes to WorldCat master bibliographic records. The Experiment, which began on February 15, 2009, will last for six months.

Few things have frustrated librarians more than finding a mistake in a master bibliographic record and not having the ability to correct it. While member libraries have been able to upgrade minimal-level records in WorldCat (subject headings and call numbers, for example), major changes required contacting OCLC to initiate the updates.

Through May, the Experiment has captured the attention of catalogers. More than 900 sites have participated in five webinars and over 1,000 institutions have changed at least one record. Individual institution numbers range from three institutions doing more than 500 replaces to 242 institutions doing 1 replace each. In all, 60,244 record replaces have been made by librarians participating in the Experiment.

“This experiment from OCLC is a great opportunity for us in the profession to push for a more ‘wiki-like’ cataloging environment where we all benefit from the knowledge of the community,” says Jennifer Eustis, Catalog/Metadata Librarian at Northeastern University Libraries. “The sheer participation says that catalogers are eager to share our work to a greater extent, to evolve into a more networked community, and to become a community that can learn from the expertise of each other in a more open environment.

“If we take into account the drive towards linked data, all of these enrichments can be seen later on as providing keys points from which to create networks of information and therefore knowledge. Instead of skeletal records, suddenly records become a repository of data nodes linked to other data nodes.”

Benefits of the Experiment

The additional capabilities provided by the Experiment are an expansion of those that have been available for several years through various database enrichment programs. The benefits of the six-month Experiment include:

Expanded use of expert community catalogers

Increased capabilities—changes can be made to full-level cataloging records and more fields in the master record

Improved sharing—more libraries making upgrades to master records

Timeliness—record edits are made in real time so there’s no waiting for updates to appear in the database

Extended portability—network-level cataloging for use in local cataloging

Increased flexibility—maintenance of WorldCat records can be shared more equally among OCLC staff and member libraries.

“We’re excited to be able to provide more flexibility that allows member libraries to make more additions and changes to records,” says Glenn Patton, Director, WorldCat Quality Management Division at OCLC. “It’s very much in the spirit of the OCLC cooperative to make record maintenance more efficient and to make the improved record available to other member libraries more quickly.”