RLG Programs: The next chapter

Managing the collective collection, renovating descriptive practices and modeling new service architectures are priority areas

By Nancy Elkington

RLG and OCLC combined on July 1, 2006. These two independent and mature nonprofit organizations had similar missions: OCLC was devoted to supporting the needs of libraries and their users while RLG was focused on supporting the needs of research repositories, including libraries, archives and museums. Both entities engaged with an international membership; both operated an online services array; both cared deeply about how technology could be harnessed for the betterment of information providers and seekers. Bringing OCLC and RLG together is achieving the twin goals of eliminating duplicative service infrastructures and better serving the needs of our shared community through the amplification of staff effort.

As in the past, RLG Programs is made up of partner institutions that choose to affiliate with the group. Partners pay annual dues, participate in programs and initiatives and contribute effort, expertise and data in order to advance the common agenda. The current partnership is comprised of about 145 libraries, archives and museums in North America, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Rim. The common thread? A focus on support for the research needs of scholars, students, teachers and citizen-learners and a preference for early, collective action on shared challenges.

Since July of this year, RLG Programs and OCLC Research staff have been working together to develop an agenda that reflects the needs of the community, builds on existing expertise and expands the community’s ability to act in concert to shape the future. The major benefit from the combination is our ability to bring the strengths of both staffs to bear on an array of initiatives from which the entire community will profit.

The new agenda is currently focused around three primary challenges: the need to manage the collectively held global collection, the desire to renovate descriptive and organizing practices, and the imperative to model the kinds of services infrastructures needed to support new modes of research, teaching and learning. Underpinning these are the means by which we can ensure the maximum reach of the effort invested in the three areas: through the development and
promulgation of appropriate architectures and standards and through ongoing efforts to understand and assess user behaviors in a time of unremitting change.

What does it mean to “manage the collective collection?” If we consider the holdings of cultural repositories worldwide in the aggregate while also contemplating the changing patterns of user behaviors, we quickly arrive at the need to think about more effective ways to help libraries, archives and museums act cooperatively in acquiring, managing and disclosing information about their collections. We will be exploring and working with partners in a range of areas:

• developing frameworks for a more dispersed contribution network for mass digitization efforts;

• developing new ways of thinking about cooperative off-site storage;

• developing new methods for making data about holdings support institutional management decisions;

• exploring new models for resource sharing in the context of network-level discovery processes; and

• experimenting with new modes of delivery that are location-independent and inclusive.

What does it mean to “renovate descriptive and organizing practices?” Our collective traditions of metadata creation extend across types of institutions and formats of physical and digital materials. Investments over time have included a variety of tools that serve to streamline our work: terminologies, gazetteers and name authority lists, to name a few. The next set of challenges converge around the need to gain more efficiencies in this vast enterprise by harnessing the power of the Web. Part of the necessary exploration will be to determine how we can change the economics of metadata creation at research institutions, how to model the attendant work flows and how to set new expectations for return on investment. Some of the areas we’ll be working on with our partners are:

• assessing and evolving classical approaches to bibliographic and archival description;

• repurposing legacy descriptions for contemporary and future discovery systems;

• aligning new approaches to collection description with participation in large scale digitization;

• developing tools and methods for more efficient description of digital objects; and

• supporting discovery of images and other digital objects and collections in major search engines.

What does it mean to “model new service infrastructures?” If we are serious about helping our communities to find the best and most effective means of supporting new modes of research, teaching and learning that are already taking shape, we need to act quickly. Systems and services are already being redeveloped to take advantage of the constant presence of the network in the lives of learners and scholars. A range of new repository, discovery, resolution
and disclosure frameworks are being put into place at OCLC as well as elsewhere. We want to help libraries, archives and museums achieve a common understanding of the processes for which they should be responsible, demonstrate these new frameworks through prototypes, and make them possible through the development of open-source code and architectures. We’ll be working with partners to reach consensus around:

• what processes should remain focused at the local level and which processes can be better carried out at the group, national or international level;

• where sharing metadata and digitized objects can happen most efficiently;

• what decision-support methods come into play when an institution must decide whether to offer access to a resource freely or charge a license fee; and

• how best to support digital collections, describe digital content and support direct delivery of digital objects.

In the coming months, we’ll be setting up a variety of advisory and working groups and we’ll be building a new Web presence to reflect the work being undertaken. Progress against our objectives will be visible to all and, as always, the fruits of our work will be freely shared with the wider community.

WorldCat Selection | By the numbers