For decades, OCLC has provided reliable infrastructure for OCLC numbers and authority records. With financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and thanks to the dedication of our advisory group members and OCLC staff, we are wrapping up the initial work on a shared entity management infrastructure.

This infrastructure includes easily accessible authoritative descriptions of works and persons, enhanced and managed by OCLC and the library community. Connections to other external vocabularies will place library collections in a broader context across the web. We’re now collecting feedback from the advisory group on the tools we’ve built to work with the infrastructure. We will soon provide our final report to the Mellon Foundation, and we are evaluating the next steps with our stakeholders.

As always, we’re closely collaborating with the library community to fully understand and address needs. We plan to allow library staff to customize their workflows around linked data opportunities through new and powerful APIs. We will also offer a basic user interface for staff to create and manage entities.

No matter how far along your library is with using new data models (including BIBFRAME), or even if you wish to continue to work in MARC, you’ll see improved data quality and workflow efficiency as a result of this new entity management infrastructure.