Ted Fons named Director, OCLC WorldCat Global Metadata Network

DUBLIN, Ohio, USA,  23 June 2008—Ted Fons has joined the OCLC management team as Director, OCLC WorldCat Global Metadata Network. In this new position, Mr. Fons will take primary responsibility for and direct the performance of WorldCat global metadata management. He will ensure the effective coordination of hundreds of projects related to the WorldCat database, and will extend and expand the utility of WorldCat metadata for electronic resource management.

WorldCat, the largest database of catalog records representing items held in libraries worldwide, continues to grow at an extraordinary rate due in part to improvements in batchloading capabilities and loading large national bibliographies. This year, OCLC is on pace to process some 264 million records—which is double the number processed last year. OCLC expects to double that number next year.

"Ted Fons is uniquely qualified to lead our international teams in the continued evolution of this rapidly expanding global resource—WorldCat," said Robin Murray, Vice President, OCLC Global Product Management. "He has an ideal combination of practical work experience, leadership and vision that will help libraries progress in today's networked, Web world."

WorldCat is the global network of library-management and user-facing services built upon cooperatively maintained databases of bibliographic and institutional metadata.  WorldCat enhances productivity across the full range of library workflows—from cataloging to resource sharing to discovery and delivery—by intelligently reusing contributed data, and making library resources more visible on the Internet by distributing data across a growing number of partner services and Web technologies.

Mr. Fons was most recently Director of Customer Services, Innovative Interfaces, Inc., where he was responsible for the global call center and customer service operations in 2008. He was Senior Product Manager from 1997-2007, responsible for establishing the market vision for the acquisitions, electronic resource management and reference linking products offered within the Innovative Interfaces integrated library system.

Mr. Fons began at Innovative Interfaces as Systems Librarian, responsible for direct customer support of specialized applications. He began his career in libraries as a Copy Cataloger at the Tisch Library, Tufts University, from 1992-1995.

He has been heavily involved in the development and implementation of a variety of standards. He continues work on the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) since 2005, and the ONIX for Serials/JWP Steering Committee.

Mr. Fons is also a writer and contributes regularly to journals focusing on library and information science issues. He is frequently invited to present at conferences around the world.

"We expect Ted to continue his leadership role as writer and speaker in the library community," said Karen Calhoun, Vice President, OCLC WorldCat and Metadata Services. "He will be a great addition to the OCLC management team, and we are confident his contributions will benefit the library community worldwide."

Mr. Fons is set to begin work at OCLC on July 14, and will reside in the Dublin, Ohio, area.

About OCLC
Founded in 1967 and headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, OCLC is a nonprofit library service and research organization that has provided computer-based cataloging, reference, resource sharing, eContent, preservation, library management and Web services to 60,000 libraries in 112 countries and territories. OCLC and its member libraries worldwide have created and maintain WorldCat, the world's richest online resource for finding library materials. For more information, visit www.oclc.org.

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