MembersCouncil discusses how to meet growing demand for digital resources

By Bob Murphy

OCLC Members Council, celebrating its 25th anniversary, met May 23–25 in Dublin, Ohio, for the last of three meetings that focused on innovation, risk-taking and new models of service.

During the meeting, Bob Seal, University Librarian, Texas Christian University, and 2003/2004 OCLC Members Council President, recognized the impact of Members Council on OCLC, the OCLC membership and on the worldwide library community over the past 25 years.

“Minutes of the first OCLC Members Council meeting note that the board chair said the creation of the Council could have a critical impact on OCLC. In looking back at my six years on Members Council, my observation is that we are, indeed, making excellent progress in strategically planning together and communicating more effectively with the stakeholders in this worldwide cooperative,” said Mr. Seal.

Much of the May meeting was devoted to discussion about how to meet growing demands by library users for digital resources—and, more specifically, how to create and manage digital repositories.

Ann Wolpert, Director of Libraries, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discussed “Institutional Repositories: The DSpace Experience at MIT.” DSpace, developed jointly by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard, is the digital library system designed to capture, store, index, preserve and redistribute the intellectual output of a university’s research faculty in digital formats. DSpace is
freely available to research institutions worldwide as an Open Source system that can be customized and extended.

Ms. Wolpert said an institutional repository is a tool that might offer part of the solution to support a new model of scholarly communication. She said that because of their expertise, commitment and reputation for preservation, libraries should take a leading role in developing institutional repositories.

“Libraries have a lot of experience in large-scale collection management. We know how to select things and how to use them. And who else cares? Who else cares about stewardship, about making sure that the records of advances in scholarship and research end up being accessible to the community of continuing researchers and learners? Ms. Wolpert asked. “If we don’t do this, who will?

“It seems to me that we librarians are best equipped— by discipline, training and reputation—to do this kind of work.”

Ms. Wolpert said that faculty and administrators are recognizing the benefits of implementing institutional repositories. She noted that digitally accessible information is statistically demonstrated to be used 10 times more often than print. “So faculty have a tremendous incentive to move their content onto the Web because they know it is going to be read on the Web,” she said. “There are really compelling reasons for provosts and presidents of academic institutions to make an institutional repository a priority in terms of making a statement about how innovative an organization is, or the depth and breadth of its intellectual content.”

John Townsend, executive director, New York State Higher Education Initiative, a collaboration between public and private academic libraries in New York, described the potential of a Collaborative Repository Model, something his organization hopes to build.

Mr. Townsend said he believes that libraries can work together, with management and policy issues in place, to add a layer of collaborative repositories between individual institutional repositories and a trusted archival depository.

He said some existing repositories can serve a dual role at an institutional level and at a collaborative level so that institutions can share technologies and costs.

“By distributing content across the technology infrastructure, I think we’re in a better position to manage it,” said Mr. Townsend.

Liz Bishoff, Vice President, OCLC Digital Collection and Metadata Services, provided an update on OCLC’s strategy and initiatives in “furthering access to the world’s digital information.”

Ms. Bishoff described four major components of the DCMS strategy: to educate staff on what it takes to be active participants in digital initiatives; to create metadata as well as digital content; to provide broad access to digital collections; and to provide a full spectrum of preservation activities—from traditional preservation to reformatted digital content, as well as born-digital content.

Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO, presented an update of OCLC activities, including progress in meeting goals established in its strategic plan to extend the cooperative, introduce new services and transform WorldCat into a globally networked, Web-based information resource.

Mr. Jordan described progress in the Open WorldCat pilot project, an effort to increase the visibility of libraries by making their records available on the Web through Web search engines. He also described how libraries are making their special collections more visible on the Web by using CONTENTdm, a software tool that allows libraries to scan, post and catalog image collections and make them available through WorldCat.

Mr. Jordan discussed OCLC’s recent installation of the FirstSearch service on a new Oracle technology platform.

“This is very good news for our member libraries and their users, who will have an even more powerful FirstSearch thanks to enhancements made possible by the new platform,” said Mr. Jordan.

The migration continues on schedule, with other OCLC services scheduled to be using the new technology by 2005.

“Going forward, our technological platform will rely on open systems architectures and adhere to technical standards that promote the cost-effective, worldwide sharing of information across platforms, scripts, languages and cultural materials,” said Mr. Jordan.

In his remarks, Mr. Jordan also emphasized OCLC’s role as an advocate for libraries. He pointed out that OCLC staff members routinely serve on a variety of boards and steering committees organized for the benefit of libraries.

“In our advocacy role, we also develop studies such as the Environmental Scan that OCLC members can use in their planning and in their own advocacy activities,” said Mr. Jordan.

Cathy De Rosa, Vice President, OCLC Marketing and Library Services, updated Members Council on discussion surrounding The 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition, a report produced for the OCLC membership to examine significant issues and trends impacting OCLC, libraries, museums, archives and other organizations.

Since its publication and distribution in print and online in late 2003, the Scan has generated a great deal of interest and discussion.

“I’ve had an opportunity to visit a number of your outstanding institutions to lead some of the discussions the Scan has helped to create,” Ms. De Rosa told delegates. “We want to present this information at a high level so that we can uncover activities that are happening in our environments, or are not happening in our environments, that may be shaping our future—in the library community, and in the OCLC cooperative.”

Ms. De Rosa pointed to three dominant patterns emerging from discussion: a decrease in guided access to content; disaggregation of information; and the need for collaboration.

Discussion will continue next year as the 2005 Members Council primary theme will be “Pattern Recognition: Moving Libraries Beyond their Comfort Zones.” It also was the basis for a symposium at the American Library Association annual conference in Orlando.

One of the findings from discussion of the Scan recognized the need for libraries to create “A Third Place”—a place where people can go to “get away.” Sandy Yee, University Librarian, Wayne State University, told Members Council how her library was able to build an effective and efficient collection of electronic resources for students and faculty in a facility that also serves as a refuge.

Wayne State opened its David Adamany Undergraduate Library in 1997 with more than 500 public access computers available to the students, a very small collection and a philosophy to have fewer than 100,000 monographs in the building at any one time. “The library has a wonderful variety of technology and study spaces,” said Ms. Yee. “It has quickly become the ‘third place’ on the university campus.”

Among the library’s priorities were to emphasize the shift from print to electronic resources, and to capture and effectively use quantifiable data in making collection decisions.

Emma Bradford Perry, Professor and Dean of Libraries, Southern University, and Chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Communication for the Collaborative, summarized the committee’s work this year, listed recommendations and moved a resolution on behalf of the committee that was unanimously passed by council.

The resolution listed specific steps to strengthen communication within the Members Council, between OCLC and the council, and between the council and the OCLC membership. “Better communication will help us become a better organization,” said Dean Perry.

Delegates also met in small group discussions, determined by specific interest and library type. “We should not underestimate the importance of our subject-oriented and type of library discussion groups because that’s where so much of our work gets done and where we have the most contact with OCLC management and staff,” said Mr. Seal.

The next OCLC Members Council meeting is set for October 24-26, in Dublin, Ohio.

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