OCLC Research Year in Review 2021

OCLC Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Cost Calculator

If library administrators and funders are to evaluate collection sharing services properly, they need access to current cost information, as well as benchmarks against which to measure their own library’s data. Launched in February 2021, the OCLC Interlibrary Loan Cost Calculator is a free, online tool that has the potential to act as a virtual real-time ILL cost study. Inspired by the outcomes of a SHARES working group and beta tested by SHARES members, the calculator already has more than 90 academic and public libraries registered globally and over 15 data sets uploaded. A recorded webinar gives a guided tour of what the tool does and how institutions and the library community can benefit.

When completed, this infrastructure will include 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.

The infrastructure will fulfill the demand for persistent URIs in OCLC’s linked data and create a “point of need” service for ID creation. It will also link library data to non-library data and local data to shared data in ways that traditional cataloging has never supported. The system will operate at scale and complement several other (transnational, national, regional, and institutional) library linked data initiatives such as the LD4P Grant, Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), BIBFRAME implementation, IFLA LRM implementations such as the national Bibliographic Transition Program in France, and Wikidata community activities.

In 2021, REALM began exploring additional questions as vaccines have become available, SARS-CoV-2 variants are on the rise, and local guidelines and restrictions change. The project completed eight laboratory tests that studied the lifespan of the virus on materials that are prevalent in libraries, archives, and museums; synthesized emerging COVID-19 research findings; and produced toolkit resources for archives, libraries, and museums to help support institutions’ local decision making.

These resources have included drawing on perspectives from the field to learn from institutional leaders’ real-world experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and how they leveraged their institution’s core strengths and drew upon trusted partners to navigate the crisis. A survey of those who read or used REALM resources found that most determined these resources to be applicable to their institutions and a majority indicated that the COVID-related information provided by REALM was more relevant for institutions like theirs than the available CDC guidance.

To address these harmful practices, OCLC was awarded a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Reimagine Descriptive Workflows by collaborating with a diverse group of experts, practitioners, and community members to determine ways to improve descriptive practices, tools, infrastructure, and workflows in libraries and archives.

Working in consultation with Shift Collective, OCLC hosted a conversation among community stakeholders who discussed how to address the systemic issues of bias and inequity within our current collection description infrastructure. The input from the convening and subsequent conversations with advisory group leaders was synthesized into a community agenda that provides two action pathways:

• A guiding framework for making necessary, fundamental shifts both in organizational culture and individual mindset to enact transformative and sustainable change in the descriptive process.
• Recommendations for operational changes that organizations can make to reimagine descriptive practices in their local and global contexts.

Improving Access to Civil Legal Justice Through Public Libraries provides training and resources to library staff to help close the justice gap in their communities by enhancing their reference skills to connect people in need of civil legal help to reliable information, resources, and services. Through OCLC’s partnership with Legal Services Corporation (LSC) and in consultation with law librarians, OCLC’s WebJunction developed:

• Creating Pathways to Civil Legal Justice, an on-demand course series that helps public library staff strengthen their ability to identify civil legal issues and connect community members to relevant information and resources.
• Eviction Resources for Libraries, a collection of resources to help library staff respond to specific questions related to eviction and housing insecurity, where timing is critical to prevention.

Archives and special collections in research and cultural heritage institutions hold their collections in trust for the public, but many struggle to manage the volume of materials under their care. Accumulations of inaccessible, poorly described collections and inadequately preserved materials can create a breach of the trust institutions hold with collection donors and users.

Developed by the OCLC Research Library Partnership’s (RLP) Collection Building and Operational Impacts Working Group, Total Cost of Stewardship offers a holistic approach to understanding the resources needed to responsibly acquire and steward archives and special collections.

The published collection includes:

1. An OCLC Research report, Total Cost of Stewardship: Responsible Collection Building in Archives and Special Collections
2. The Tool Suite, comprising of a set of communication tools, a set of cost estimation tools, and a user manual
3. An annotated bibliography of related resources

The Secret Life of Data—Collective Curation

The Secret Life of Data project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, studies the creation, management, and reuse of archaeological data. The project aims to improve the quality of information that archaeological excavation teams collect. Recent articles identify opportunities for collective curation during team-based research that focus on discussing, negotiating, and forming consensus about what data and documentation are important, given different research objectives and data practices:

• “Using collective curation to pay data forward in the life cycle”
• “Identifying opportunities for collective curation during archaeological excavations”

With a primary focus on integrating people rather than technology, the actions that indivuduals take as data move through the life cycle become the focal point for change.

Research information management (RIM) is a rapidly growing area of investment in US research universities. While RIM practices are mature in Europe—with a community of practice led by euroCRIS—and other locales in support of nationalized reporting requirements, RIM practices at US research universities have taken a different—and characteristically decentralized—course. A complex environment characterized by multiple use cases, stakeholders, and systems has resulted.

To give context for institutional leaders to examine their local practices, the Research Information Management in the United States project published a two-part report that presents a thorough examination of RIM practices, goals, stakeholders, and system components at US research universities.

Part 1—Findings and Recommendations offers a summary of six discrete RIM use cases and proposes a RIM system framework and recommendations for RIM stakeholders. Part 2—Case Studies offers an in-depth narrative of the RIM practices at five US research institutions.

The Researching Students’ Information Choices research project has used task-based simulation to discover how students (4th grade through graduate school) identify, choose, and evaluate online resources for a school assignment and the role of format in that evaluation. OCLC research is partnering with the University of Florida and Rutgers University in these efforts.

The project team published “Backgrounds and behaviors: Which students successfully identify online resources in the face of container collapse,” which describes students’ variable ability to identify whether a resource is from a book, magazine, journal, or website, and how this ability is affected by their demographic traits, the resource features they attended to, and their behaviors during the simulation. The results indicate that correct identification of a resource’s “container” requires deep engagement with the resource.

The project is conducting work in parallel across multiple focus areas, including:

• Investigations of user and contributor needs in relation to finding aid aggregations
• Evaluation of the quality of existing finding aid metadata
• Technical assessments of potential systems to support network functions, and formulating system requirements for a minimum viable product instantiation of the network
• Efforts to support community building, sustainability planning, and governance modeling as this work moves from a project to a program, post-2022

In an OCLC Next blog post on the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Global Council Delegate Lorely Ambriz (Head Librarian/Assistant Professor, El Paso Community College) writes, “Libraries are logical partners for local economic and sustainable development initiatives, particularly those that focus on people and quality of life,” because library staff “already play a vital role in establishing these kinds of partnerships to ensure access to information and knowledge, which are vital to ensuring sustainable societies.”

OCLC’s Global Council partnered with OCLC Research to survey libraries worldwide on their current and potential contributions toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Data from 1,722 respondents representing 16 countries in the Americas; 63 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; and 20 Countries from the Asia Pacific region provided a global insight on libraries and SDGs, which was published in a September 2021 bulletin.

Global Council hosted a series of five webinars to create awareness and dialogue among library leaders around the globe on the SDGs. Nearly 3,300 people registered for the webinars with more than 1,500 individuals attending the live sessions.

This high-level briefing synthesizes findings and recommendations within the context of work experiences, collections experiences, and engagement experiences. And within each of these contexts, it identifies New Model Library transformations occurring through four areas of impact:

• Agility—Taking quick and innovative action in response to changing circumstances and expectations
• Collaboration—Working with stakeholders to lead change within libraries, institutions, and communities
• Virtualization—Expanding online library experiences for staff and the community
• Space—Finding new ways to engage within the physical library

This collective view provides context and guidance as library leaders and their staff navigate their own transformations toward a New Model Library.