Our staff of research scientists and program officers engage in many activities, the core of which is the research project. Projects allow fluid teams of people to focus on defined opportunities for experimentation and other types of investigation, prototyping and advancing standards. We have organized our activities into six major themes:
The remainder of this page contains a list of all our current activities in alphabetical order.
All Current Activities
Data mining of the one million MARC records for archival materials in WorldCat will provide a systemwide overview of descriptive practice and enable recommendations for more effective description and discovery.
Collect query logs, Web logs, and various web analytics; evaluate their usefulness for research about how researchers use archival cross-searching networks and other tools that archives use to publish their finding aids.
Identification of barriers to implementing Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and practical suggestions for getting around those obstacles.
This data mining project seeks patterns in the worldwide book publishing industry, as reflective of different cultures’ literary heritage. It stems from UNESCO interest in statistical traces of cultural diversity.
Classify is a FRBR-based prototype designed to support the assignment of classification numbers and subject headings for books, DVDs, CDs, and other types of materials.
A metadata publishing tool that transfers information between databases and different formats.
This work seeks to establish best practice for the disposition of print journals available in electronic form – i.e. when it is most appropriate to retain print back files on campus, when to store offsite, and when to deaccession entirely.
This work aims to characterize the generic business requirements for managing physical research library collections as a shared network resource.
This activity looks at existing archival collections assessment activities across institutions, puts them into context, and makes recommendations for best practice.
Browse and search collections organized by the DDC.
FAST is an enumerative facetted subject heading schema derived from the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). FAST is easier to apply and can be successfully used by non-professionals.
FictionFinder is a FRBR-based prototype that provides access to over 2.9 million bibliographic records for fiction books, eBooks, and audio materials described in OCLC WorldCat.
This activity conducts new research to provide evidence to inform possible changes in MARC metadata practices that could lead to better user access to the collective collection.
Develop use case scenarios for academic libraries and scholars, archivists and archival users, and institutional repositories describing their needs to uniquely identify and distinguish persons and organizations, then define the characteristics, functions, and data attributes of a cooperative "Identities Hub".
Facilitate refinement, publication and dissemination of EAC.
The “info” URI Registry was set up on behalf of NISO to identify and describe registered “info” URIs.
This project attempts to mitigate the risk aversion that is related to rights management and special collections, often interfering with our mission of providing access to those collections.
An investigation into the incentives and strategies for deep and transformative collaboration among libraries, archives and museums (or LAMs).
The goal of the Metadata Schema Transformation project is to develop a simple, web-accessible service that translates metadata records from one publicly defined format into another.
In order to centralize information about stolen and missing rare books and special collections, this working group developed a procedure to “tag” records in WorldCat.org. The tagged records are then automatically fed to a blog, missingmaterials.org. Simultaneously, holdings are set in WorldCat, in order to alert prospective buyers and sellers.
This project creates tools supporting standards-based data sharing in the museum community, and provides insights into the characteristics of large aggregations of museum descriptions.
OCLC Research's NACO Normalization Service enables systems to convert names and other text strings to a format more conducive to machine comparison and sorting.
This project attempts to develop tools that advance the state of the art in extracting names from unstructured text and disambiguating them using authority files developed in the library community.
OAICat is a Java Servlet implementation of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) v2.0.
Allows museums to disclose descriptions of collection items as well as pointers to digital surrogates.
Translate a group of metadata records from one format to another.
OCLC Research participates in both the PREMIS Maintenance Activity and Editorial Committee. The Maintenance Activity is responsible for planning, organizing, and coordinating work and activities related to the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata. The PREMIS Editorial Committee has specific responsibility for managing the Data Dictionary, including supporting its use and coordinating future updates and revisions.
An experimental service to provide authority control for publisher names in bibliographic catalogs.
PURLs (Persistent Uniform Resource Locators) are Web addresses that act as permanent identifiers in the face of a dynamic and changing Web infrastructure.
This project involves issuing a provocative call to action, urging academic libraries to take a more significant role in their institution's mission to support research.
Investigation of what is needed in order to be able to offer responsible management of locally produced research data.
This project includes the evaluation, sustainability, and relevance of virtual reference services, which are human-mediated, Internet-based library information services. The study of VRS users, non-users, and librarians provided a fuller understanding of their behaviors, needs, and preferences in virtual environments, in order to improve libraries' ability to respond to increased demand on libraries to provide reference services online.
SHARES is a membership-wide program of expedited, cost-saving interlibrary lending that also develops innovative new methods to improve collections sharing.
Identify the user contributions that would enrich the descriptive metadata created by libraries, archives, and museums and the issues that need to be resolved to communicate and share user contributions on the network level.
Streamlining procedures for successful delivery of rare and unique materials to users will maximize use of increasingly limited staff and financial resources.
The SRW/U Open Source project offers software that implements both the SRW Web Service and the SRU REST model interface to databases. Included are interfaces that support DSpace and Lucene implementation and OCLC's Pears database.
This working group is addressing workflow and policy issues arising from digitizing (and copying) materials from special collections.
A study of the role of research libraries in the higher education research assessment regimes in five countries.
A detailed survey of more than 300 special collections and archives in academic and research libraries throughout the United States and Canada will identify norms across the community as well as define needs for community action and further research.
Create, print and save custom Tag Clouds for Web pages or other textual data.
This project provides Web-based services for controlled vocabularies.
A list of research support services will be tested with researchers to learn how well their needs are being met.
The NDLTD Union Catalog project focuses on thesis metadata via the Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). This is a lightweight protocol for moving or sharing metadata that allows synchronization of loosely coupled databases and mandates XML Dublin Core as the default metadata format.
VIAF explores virtually combining the name authority files of national level authority files into a single name authority service.
View rich descriptions for books and other library materials.
WorldCat Identities has a summary page for every name in WorldCat.
Librarians' Toolbox:
