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Library cooperation in the 21st century Sharing resources and managing the library in new ways Sponsoring cooperative learning Gates, OCLC to develop campaign More cooperation enhances WorldCat Managing the collective collection Statistics from cooperatives worldwide Download this issue (2.77 MB pdf)
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How we succeed togetherBy Brad Gauder
‘Cooperation’ takes on different forms at different organizations, often with some sort of benefit for a larger community. At OCLC, cooperation is a core value and a founding principle. Here are a few examples of the widely varying cooperative efforts that play a part in OCLC’s daily activities, and how they benefit the library community. IFLA Fellowship programIntroduced in 2000, the IFLA/OCLC Early Career Development Fellowship Program (renamed for OCLC President Jay Jordan in 2008) provides early career and continuing education for library and information science professionals from countries with developing economies. The program is jointly sponsored by the American Theological Association, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and OCLC. A panel of sponsor representatives selects up to six Fellows, including one from a theological library, for the annual, five-week program. Four weeks of the program are based at OCLC headquarters in Dublin,Ohio. The fifth week is based at OCLC’s office in Leiden, the Netherlands. The program gives Fellows opportunities to:
Fellows develop specific professional development plans to guide their continued growth and contributions to their home libraries after completion of the Fellowship program. OCLC hosted the first class of Fellows in 2001 and, following its 2009 program, will have hosted 44 Fellows from 28 countries. OAIster database hostingIn 2002, the University of Michigan (UM) launched the OAIster database with grant support from the Mellon Foundation. It was developed to test the feasibility of building a portal to open-archive collections using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI -PMH). OCLC worked closely with the Open Archives Initiative in the technical and policy work in developing the OAI-PMH protocol. Under UM’s stewardship, OAIster grew to become one of the world’s largest aggregations of records that point to open-archive collections—more than 19 million records contributed by 1,000+ organizations worldwide as of early 2009. With long-term sustainability of OAIster in mind, UM approached OCLC to discuss how this resource could continue to thrive on OCLC’s service platform. In January 2009, UM and OCLC announced a partnership to ensure continued public access to open-archive collections through OAIster and expand the visibility of these collections to information seekers through OCLC services. The OAIster database is now available to subscribers of the OCLC FirstSearch Base Package. It complements the resources in the WorldCat database with unique digital resources that include digitized books and articles, digital text, audio and video files, photos and downloadable statistical information. OCLC plans to add OAIster access through the WorldCat.org interface later in 2009 for even greater visibility of OAIster content. John Wilkin, Associate University Library, University of Michigan Library, comments: “OCLC plays a pivotal role in the business of metadata creation and distribution. Situating OAIster with OCLC helps to create an increasingly comprehensive discovery resource for users.” WebJunctionIn 2002, OCLC received a three-year, $9 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a Web-based community to help public libraries across the U.S. and Canada enhance their public access computing programs. On May 12, 2003, this community, WebJunction, was officially launched. On its Web site, WebJunction identifies strongly with the values of community and cooperation:
Guided by an advisory committee whose members have extensive experience working in or with libraries, WebJunction has grown into a thriving, online community for those who deliver technology, training and other services to library users. This community helps its participants:
With more than 30,000 registered members and 90,000 unique site visitors each month, WebJunction’s reach into the library community is strong and steady. Dublin Core Metadata InitiativeA hallway conversation at the 2nd International World Wide Web Conference in late 1994 about the difficulty of finding resources on the Web provided the impetus for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), now widely known as a leading metadata standard. This conversation included OCLC researchers Stuart Weibel and Eric Miller, OCLC Office of Research Director Terry Noreault, Joseph Hardin of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and the late Yuri Rubinsky of SoftQuad. Their brainstorming led to a joint workshop cohosted by NCSA and OCLC in March 1995, at which more than 50 people discussed the considerable usefulness of a core set of semantics for categorizing the Web to make search and retrieval and the management of Web content easier. Because the workshop was held at OCLC headquarters in Dublin, Ohio, the result was named ‘Dublin Core Metadata.’ Since then, more than a dozen conferences and workshops have been held on four continents, and the Dublin Core has become an ISO standard. In 2001, the format was broadened to include tutorials and peer-reviewed conference papers and posters. This offered the metadata community enhanced opportunities to learn, exchange ideas and work on development of Dublin Core metadata standards. Recognizing that the language of metadata is generally the language of a resource description, the DCMI standard now includes a registry that provides definitions in more than 20 languages. With material support of OCLC and other organizations, it has evolved into an open organization—also known as DCMI—that focuses on the development of interoperable online metadata standards that facilitate the finding, sharing and management of information.
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