research.htm [OCLC]

No.16
ISSN: 1559-0011
August 2010

Expanding research opportunities for the cooperative

How OCLC Research engages the global research community

By Brian Lavoie

The work of OCLC Research is embedded in a broader landscape of research activities conducted within the library community, higher education and elsewhere. An essential aspect of Research’s mission therefore is to connect its activities to those occurring outside OCLC, and to contribute toward the general advancement of a community-wide research agenda benefiting libraries, archives and museums.

OCLC Research’s interactions with the external research community can be divided into three categories: funding, collaboration and support.

Funding occurs through the OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grant Program. The program makes several annual awards of up to $15,000 each to support one-year research projects in the fields of librarianship and information science. These awards help make possible a range of interesting and useful research activities that might not otherwise be undertaken. Projects recently awarded grants include a study of user interactions with social discovery systems; an analysis of user experiences with open-source library automation systems; and an assessment of the value of socially created metadata for image indexing.

Collaboration is a significant component of many OCLC Research activities. Research staff partner with colleagues outside OCLC to work on a wide range of projects benefiting the library community. For example, the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) was initiated as a joint project between OCLC, the Library of Congress, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and has since grown into an international authorities resource hosted by OCLC that maps personal name authority records across 22 authority files from around the world.

Another example of collaboration is the OhioLINK data project between OCLC Research and the OhioLINK consortium, to collect and aggregate holdings and circulation data across OhioLINK member institutions to better understand the scope and usage patterns of the OhioLINK collective collection. Looking ahead, collaboration with partners across the library-archive-museum community will continue to feature in many OCLC Research projects.

The third way that OCLC Research interacts with the broader research community is through in-kind support for research activities external to OCLC. Provision of this support is in keeping with OCLC’s public purpose, and helps advance a broader, community-wide research program extending beyond the work undertaken directly by OCLC Research. Often, OCLC’s in-kind support takes the form of making WorldCat data available to researchers external to OCLC. These researchers are usually academics or library-archive-museum professionals; the data must be used for research purposes only, with the expectation that the results of the research will be made available in the open literature. OCLC Research staff work with the external researcher to determine the best fit between his or her research goals and the available data; often, considerable processing of the data is necessary to convert it into a form that suits the researcher’s needs. Once OCLC Research has prepared the data for use, it is then made available to the researcher free-of-charge under an OCLC research-use license.

Most of the research projects that have been furnished with WorldCat data relate directly to the interests of libraries, archives and museums. For example, a collaboration between the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, the California Digital Library and the University of California Berkeley’s School of Information is using WorldCat data in support of the Social Networks and Archival Context project, which is examining the value of leveraging archival authority records to facilitate access to cultural heritage materials.

But not all research projects using WorldCat data originate in the cultural heritage community. Researchers from a variety of disciplines are discovering that library-generated data is of great value in illuminating a wide-ranging array of research questions. For example, researchers at the University of Toronto are using WorldCat bibliographic and holdings data to track the adoption and diffusion of key technologies over time through the analysis of publication patterns. Researchers from nonlibrary fields who have used WorldCat data in their work often remark on the scope and depth of the bibliographic descriptions librarians have created and are excited at the potential applicability of this data in many strands of scholarly inquiry.

“I’m working on a project studying the careers of biomedical researchers, based on their publication patterns and other data,” said Bruce Weinberg, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University. “Based on WorldCat’s reputation, I approached OCLC to obtain access to their bibliographic data, which they were happy to share with me. I can also share this data with other academic researchers as part of the data sets we are building for the project. The inclusion of OCLC’s data greatly increases the value of this project.”

Through engagement with the external research community, OCLC Research connects its own work to a broader context; supports a broader, community-wide research program for libraries, archives and museums; and demonstrates the value of library-generated data sources as input to research in a variety of disciplines. For more information on ways to interact with OCLC Research, please contact us at research@OCLC.org, +1-614-764-6000.

Promoting cooperative research

Funding

Collaboration

Support