OCLC Metadata Services Staff in Anaheim

David Whitehair is the Global Product Manager for Cataloging & Metadata Services.  He manages the group who is responsible for many of our services including Connexion, Contract Cataloging, WorldCat Selection, and Language Sets. 

Several of us from the Cataloging & Metadata Services group attended the American Library Association meeting in Anaheim, California recently. 

ALA is probably the busiest conference for us... we host meetings and give presentations, serve on committees, spend lots of time talking with members, meet with our many vendor partners, and lots more!  In all, the ALA participants from our division gave 13 different presentations on topics from access to hidden collections, multilingual MelvilClass (see Michael Panzer's earlier post), access to non-English materials in public libraries, Next Generation Cataloging, OCLC's eSerials Holdings Service, the WorldCat database and authority control, non-Latin character data ... plus we gave a variety of updates.

Although like most attendees we are exhausted by the end of the conference, we couldn't imagine June/July without it. (OK... I will admit... some of us really question why does the OCLC breakfast have to be at 7:00 AM on Sunday?  And why do we have to be there at 6:30?  We love the breakfast, but how about a brunch instead?!  Ha!)  Also like most attendees, at each ALA we sample the local cuisine--and one dinner we try to have together.  This time we had a fab-u-lous group dinner at Mr Stox, where we welcomed our team members who traveled the farthest (Janifer Gatenby and Daniel van Spanje from our OCLC Leiden office). Here's Glenn Patton offering a toast to tech services (no kidding!).

Here is just a peek into some of our activities.  Friday included the Enhance Sharing Session which was hosted by Jay Weitz and Glenn Patton.  Glenn was then joined by Robert Bremer to host a meeting to discuss the implementation of the new linking ISSN.  Saturday started early for the Dewey team members Libbie Crawford, Michael Panzer, Joan Mitchell, Giles Martin, and Juli Beall, who hosted a record-breaking turnout at the Dewey Update Breakfast (wow... I guess I shouldn't complain about getting up early for the Sunday breakfast... the Dewey team does this two days in a row).