Members Council discusses innovation in library services 

DUBLIN, Ohio, USA, 9 November 2007—OCLC Members Council met October 21-23 in Dublin, Ohio, to discuss innovative development and delivery of services to libraries worldwide.

Under the leadership of Members Council President Sandy Yee, Dean of Libraries, Wayne State University (MLC), delegates also provided input to an ongoing governance study, passed a resolution encouraging OCLC leadership to advance delivery of eContent to libraries, and met in small groups to discuss ideas and topics of particular interest to delegates.

Information 3.0

   Stephen Abram, Vice President of Innovation at SirsiDynix, opened the meeting with a provocative presentation titled, "Information 3.0—What's Next?" in which he challenged delegates to embrace new technologies and new ways of thinking to reshape the future of libraries. Mr. Abram is a noted library thought leader with extensive experience in library technology and trend forecasting, new product conceptualization and market development. He has more than 25 years in libraries as a practicing librarian and in the information industry.

   Mr. Abram noted that the pattern for libraries and learning is changing, "and OCLC, SisriDynix, some of the bigger cooperatives and some of the bigger networks have got to take a leadership position" in this change.

   "I think we look too much at the trees instead of the forest," said Mr. Abram. "How do we create a learning experience? How do we make learning happen? Now that we know we inherit a suite of learning styles on our genome—in that mathematicians inherit their mathematical ability, actors inherit their acting ability—and we're sitting there with our little cohort of friends in the library world who are all text-based learners, trying to build text-based systems and text-based repositories, and text-based Web sites and text-based search engines" to address these learning needs.

   He suggested that libraries need to focus on how people are learning and how they want to learn so that libraries can provide the right environment to facilitate learning.

   "Are we actually thinking through what ultimately has to happen in how learning happens?" asked Mr. Abrams. "If we know that people are pre-coded in their genetics to actually receive information in different ways, and we know that 20 percent of the population are effective text-based learners, are we ready to ignore the other 80 percent?  Are we going to deal with the complexity of the human condition instead of complicated search strategies?  And are we asking ourselves hard enough questions?"

   Mr. Abram also urged libraries to put more staff members out in front of library users, whether in a physical library or a virtual world.

   "The vast majority of libraries put their staff in the back office meeting the library's needs for their pain points and absolutely not in the front office where they can make a difference in their community," he said. "And if we aren't putting our staff out on the social web—with their tags, with their Facebook account, with their MySpace—if they're not integrating with the social space where 80 percent of all the users who matter are, how quickly are we running away from relevance by doing that?"

   Listen to Mr. Abram's entire presentation here:  http://progressive.powerstream.net/002/00173/MembersCouncil_October2007/Abram0089.mp3.

   Innovation at Worthington Public Libraries

   As the Gale/Library Journal 2007 National Library of the Year, Worthington Public Libraries is committed to embracing new technologies and new ways of thinking about service to users. Meribah Mansfield, Director, and Members Council delegate from OHIONET, spoke to delegates about innovation at the library she has directed to such national prominence.

   Worthington Public Libraries serves more than 60,000 residents from its community northeast of Columbus, Ohio, and just east of Dublin.  The Libraries—two branches—are currently undergoing renovations that will build on their success. The renovations include:  group study rooms; living rooms with browsing areas; a cafe with beverages and food; more computers; a separate remote reference room where staff can focus on communicating with patrons electronically; teen areas; automated materials handling and circulation systems; self-checkout and self return; and a drive-up window for pick-up of reserves.

   "We have a blog so that the public can track the renovation progress and our teens are helping us design their areas with social networking tools such as voting on what chairs they want," said Ms. Mansfield. "We're also developing a new customer service model. We're doing roving reference like many of you are probably doing. And we're staffing a welcome desk to help orient our patrons to all these changes."

   Ms. Mansfield pointed out that her staff is very much engaged with library patrons--whether they're in the library, in schools, or online. "Our staff is out with the public most of the time, either in the library or out in pre-schools, day-care centers, elementary, middle and high schools, businesses and working with city government.  They are committed, excited librarians."

   "Our staff has produced podcasts, videos of our programs for our 'Programs to Go' Web site.  We're on MySpace, YouTube and flickr.  Staff use wikis and blogs to communicate with the public and with each other.  I don't hire librarians who don't live and breathe social networking."

   Ms. Mansfield acknowledged that her colleagues on Members Council are likely to have implemented many of the forward-thinking practices that Worthington Public Libraries has employed.  So she directed part of her presentation to some things libraries are unable to do now, but might be able to do with help from OCLC and the collaborative model it created when it was founded 40 years ago.

   Ms. Mansfield said that WorldCat Local, the service that that will allow libraries to combine the cooperative power of OCLC member libraries with the ability to customize WorldCat.org, might provide the solution for local discovery and delivery of services that patrons want.

   OCLC President's Report

   Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO, provided an update on OCLC's activities and plans for the future.  Mr. Jordan discussed efforts to extend the cooperative, noting that OCLC opened an office in Beijing in July. He said that international content in a variety of languages continues to be added to WorldCat at an impressive rate. This growth is attributable to improvements in batchloading processes and OCLC's new technological platform, which has Unicode capabilities and supports 12 language scripts.

   Mr. Jordan noted that in the last six months, OCLC has made a series of organizational moves designed in execute its strategy.

   "Our goals are to achieve global integration of our various services, remove redundancies and identify critical gaps in our product offerings," said Mr. Jordan. He said OCLC has built teams of employees from various geographic regions and given them clear lines of authority; aligned OCLC user-facing activities in three major geographic areas: The Americas, Asia Pacific, and Europe, Middle East and Africa; and created global engineering and global product management divisions--with eight engineering centers in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.

   "Going forward, we want to provide local, group and global nodes that work together seamlessly and symbiotically as we continue to pursue our mission of furthering access to the world's information and reducing costs for libraries," he said.

   The Future of Bibliographic Control

   Karen Calhoun, OCLC Vice President, WorldCat & Metadata Services, engaged delegates in a lively interactive discussion about WorldCat and the future of bibliographic control. Having perused a variety of pertinent "top 10" lists available from library and information science sources, she reviewed a combined list of 10 top trends in global librarianship and asked delegates to list their top three trends in technical services.

   Ms. Calhoun cited three significant trends as:

• Pressure on technical services budgets, staffing and space
• Changing, complex technical services landscape
• Public, international debate on the future and value of bibliographic control.

   Ms. Calhoun polled delegates on important questions such as "Do you believe there is a trend of not fully replacing cataloging staff when incumbents leave?" and "How do you see the trend for the outsourcing of non-electronic resources in your department?"

   Seventy-two percent of the delegates saw the outsourcing trend increasing and 20 percent rated it as staying the same. In her concluding comments, Ms. Calhoun outlined existing and proposed OCLC services such as "next generation cataloging," an emerging service to re-use publisher and vendor metadata but also to augment brief third-party records through WorldCat data mining.

   Ms. Calhoun concluded with a new vision for re-engineered, technology-based OCLC Metadata Services to help libraries capture significant staff savings in selection, acquisitions, and cataloging for redeployment to new strategic initiatives to serve their communities.  Delegate input at this session assisted in identifying future needs for metadata services and what OCLC can do to help meet those emerging needs.

   Reports and resolutions

   Delegates also heard reports and took part in discussions:

• Bill Crowe, Spencer Librarian, University of Kansas, and member of the OCLC Board of Trustees, led a discussion about the ongoing study of OCLC governance.
• Jamie LaRue, Director, Douglas County (Colorado) Libraries (BCR), and Chair of the Nominating Committee, reported briefly on the committee's deliberations and encouraged delegates to submit a Members Council Leadership Interest Form.
• Larry Alford, Vice Provost for Libraries and University Librarian, Temple University, and member of the OCLC Board of Trustees, talked about the upcoming election of two delegates from Council to the OCLC Board.
• Pat Wilkinson, Director, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Forrest R. Polk Library (WILS), and Chair, Task Force on E-Book Integration, reported key observations on e-books and presented a related resolution for OCLC Members Council to consider.  At its Business Meeting, Council unanimously passed the resolution on e-book actions for the global collaborative which recommended that the OCLC Strategic Leadership Team (SLT) consider steps to increase its efforts to provide eContent to libraries worldwide.  The SLT is to report back to Members Council by the May 2008 meeting.
• Rick Schwieterman, OCLC Executive Vice President and CFO, provided an update on OCLC NetLibrary activities.
• Chip Nilges, OCLC Vice President, Business Development, presented delegates with an update on the OCLC Content Strategy.
    
     The next OCLC Members Council meeting is February 10-12, 2008, in Dublin, Ohio.
     Listen to all presentations from audio files of the October 2007 Member Council meeting here:  http://www.oclc.org/memberscouncil/meetings/default.htm.
    
  

About Members Council
The 66-delegate Members Council supports OCLC's mission by serving as the key discussion forum and communications link between member libraries, regional networks and other partners, and OCLC management.  By providing a channel for recommendations and questions from Members Council delegates, approving changes in the Code of Regulations, and electing six members of the Board of Trustees, Members Council helps shape the future direction of OCLC.

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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