August 2009 Archives

The publication of Resource Description and Access (RDA) is imminent. The standard is planned for formal release later this year. Owing to the important role OCLC services take in descriptive workflow in libraries, we have heard many questions about OCLC's involvement in the standard's development and testing.

Last month, at the American Library Association's Annual Meeting in Chicago, Ted Fons gave a presentation entitled Beyond the Record: OCLC and the Future of MARC.* I wanted to call attention to two slides within that wide-ranging presentation that are a succinct digest of that involvement. The first slide indicates external activities:

• Committee Contribution:
• ex-officio membership in the ALA Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access
• MARC Advisory Committee
• Staff Participation:
• Joint Steering Committee's two RDA Examples Groups
• RDA/MARC Working Group
• Representation on ALA ALCTS RDA Implementation Task Force
• Various program sessions

The next slide indicates the internal activities relating to RDA:

• OCLC Internal Activities:
• Discussions with the three U.S. national libraries to plan for the testing/evaluation period (late 2009)
• Planning for MARC21 format changes to support the testing/evaluation period
• OCLC Contract Services to staff have been selected to participate in the testing/evaluation period.

In the presentation, Ted notes ways in which OCLC has already moved beyond MARC record structures. Our work with a hub-and-spoke metadata crosswalking scheme and with modeling FRBR work sets, has informed our ability to absorb new formats and metadata standards. It has also directly informed our thinking about entities and relationships, most notably in WorldCat Identities. This work allows us to offer the features and functionality necessary to respond to the needs of our member libraries as they begin to test and use RDA.

For a fuller description of OCLC's RDA-related activities, please see Glenn Patton's  authoritative statement, available here: http://www.oclc.org/news/announcements/announcement386.htm.

In addition, Karen Calhoun is organizing an OCLC webinar on the topic of OCLC and RDA to be offered sometime in the fall. Anyone may register and attend. Please watch for an announcement on the OCLC webinar page at http://www.oclc.org/us/en/news/websessions/default.htm.

*Ted Fons' full presentation, which also discusses OCLC metadata crosswalking, and FRBR works, is available from ALA via: http://tinyurl.com/FonsMARC

With so many travel budgets (including OCLC's) slashed to the bone this year, the new or formerly well-traveled professional turns his or her thoughts toward alternative means for networking, sharing and keeping up with the latest. Webinars are an obvious choice, but IMO many tend to be dull for the presenter and audience alike. So some OCLC colleagues and I decided to try something new--an experiment with the more interactive features of the webinar software we use here in the Ohio offices, Webex. But first we had to choose a topic.

I've been an admirer of the usability studies that OCLC's Christie Heitkamp and her team have been undertaking, partly in collaboration with early adopters of WorldCat Local. For my part, some of you may be aware that over the past year I worked with members of Janet Hawk's market research group here at OCLC to investigate what data 'quality' means to a variety of constituencies of library online catalogs. This spring we published our study and over the past few months we have been disseminating the results.

Christie's team is concentrating on making the end user's experience better through the interface; my team's focus is to learn how to optimize the utility of the data underlying the interface (can't have one without the other--both data and interface are important). We thought an exploration of our two studies might be an interesting topic for our first try at a more interactive, dare-I-say more 'usable' webinar.

The resulting webinar, "Online Catalogs: Designing with Users in Mind", recorded Aug. 13, 2009, was designed to elicit more engagement with attendees (there were 228 of them representing a wide range of types of libraries and librarians/staff). Our purpose was to create a two-way learning environment. We tried out the polling and chat features, opened the chat and full screen views to all attendees, paused at several points for Q&A, and solicited direct feedback at the end of the session. The technology cooperated, shall we say, some of the time, so it was necessary to ask for attendees' forbearance on several occasions. Our post-event analysis of the chat suggests that many were willing to bear with us as we learn the ins and outs of these new methods to communicate with one another. Christie and I (and our teams) certainly gained numerous insights from what attendees had to say.  

For your reference, you can link to the recording of the event, in which Christie and I report on their online catalog research findings, discuss user and usability studies, and describe resulting changes made to WorldCat, WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local. We've also made the chat dialog available for reading (the chat also contains our answers to questions, added after the event), as well as the polling results. 

We welcome your comments on the chat transcript, the recording, our reports (see links below), the webinar format ...as well as your suggestions for future webinar topics.

For more about our research:

An 8-page paper on Christie's team's research is available from  http://www.oclc.org/worldcatlocal/usability. 

My team's study of what users and librarians want from online catalogs is freely downloadable from http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/onlinecatalogs/default.htm.  For those not ready to sit down with a 50-plus page report, there is also a two-page executive summary.  Watch the page for our forthcoming 15-page synopsis as well.