Representing the collective collection of libraries

Libraries and publishers are inextricably linked, and their future, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, isn’t what it used to be.

The future used to be about books and printed materials. While the general public still regards books as the key component of the library brand, librarians know better. The collection of one library, let alone the collective collection of libraries around the world, continues to undergo dramatic change.

Nowhere is that change more visible than in the WorldCat database.

On WorldCat’s first day of operation on August 26, 1971, the database consisted entirely of records on the books bibliographic format. That was because the Library of Congress MARC format covered only monographs. LC added serials to the MARC format in 1974. OCLC implemented LC-MARC formats for maps, music scores, sound recordings and manuscripts in 1976. As of June 30, 2010, the percentage of records in WorldCat that represent books was about 85 percent. That’s a very gradual decline from nearly 100 percent over the past 39 years. The percentage of digital items being cataloged in WorldCat is on the rise: 1.5 million of them were cataloged last year, a very gradual increase to be sure. At some point in the future, will the two trends intersect?

For now, however, print publishing continues to be strong. According to Bowker’s Book Industry Statistics, the number of book titles published in the U.S. climbed from 113,589 in 1999 to 288,355 in 2009. Meanwhile, Amazon.com recently predicted that its e-book sales would surpass that of both paperback and hardcover books in a couple of years.

The persistence of print and innovation in electronic printing is presenting libraries and publishers with new challenges and opportunities. In addition to physical holdings, managing a library collection now involves dealing with licensed digital content and local library content that is being digitized, including institutional repository records, archival records and records from sources such as Google and HathiTrust.

OCLC is developing services that will help libraries manage their collections across the technological spectrum, from clay tablets to born-digital items.

OCLC Metadata Services for Publishers enriches publisher ONIX title metadata with WorldCat data and standardizes it before returning it to the publisher ready for use in supply chain systems and communications. This enriched metadata also becomes available to libraries for use in selection, acquisition and technical services workflows. In addition, it’s visible to information seekers who use WorldCat.org to search for materials. The end result is that libraries and their users benefit from improved timeliness in the display of bibliographic information. It’s crucial to the future of publishers and libraries that we move toward collaborative, creative and networked use of publisher and library metadata for the benefit of multiple user communities.

At the born-digital side of the spectrum, there is the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway. This service enables OAI repository managers from libraries, museums and archives to contribute metadata records for digital materials to WorldCat. This Web-based tool is designed for self-service use and lets repository managers customize how their metadata displays in WorldCat.org and determine their metadata harvesting schedule. Additionally, it applies their institutions’ holdings symbols to their records, thereby highlighting the unique information resources their institutions are contributing to WorldCat. More than 500,000 records have entered WorldCat through the gateway in the past year.

In the fiscal 2009 OCLC Annual Report, for the first time, we published statistics showing how the collective collection of libraries worldwide is being represented in WorldCat.org in three categories: 1) physical holdings in WorldCat; 2) licensed electronic content in library collections; and 3) local library content being digitized. Last year, the total number of items for these categories was 1.8 billion. This year, it will be 2.1 billion. While the future of libraries and publishing will be both print and electronic for some time to come, managing a library collection has become more complicated than ever before. The recent announcement by the Library of Congress that it will digitally archive every public tweet that has occurred on Twitter since its inception in March 2006 makes it clear that even more change is on the way.

Going forward, we will continue to extend WorldCat to keep pace with the ever-expanding body of worldwide knowledge and information.

Jay Jordan
OCLC President and Chief Executive Officer

Contents | The future of publishing