November 2009 Archives
OCLC is working to make available in WorldCat the records and location information of the Danish National Union Catalogue (DANBIB) (see the February 2009 announcement at http://www.oclc.org/enews/2009/08/en_denmark.htm). OCLC's agreement with the Dansk BiblioteksCenter (DBC) was the result of a year-long pilot coordinated with the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media (DALM). The pilot took place with the participation of academic and public libraries from across Denmark. When the loading into WorldCat is done, there will be approximately 10 million DANBIB records represented in WorldCat.
There have been two major projects with French metadata. The first is bringing approximately 15 million records from the Bibliothèque nationale de France. (BnF). This project, announced in June 2009 (http://www.oclc.org/us/en/news/releases/200936.htm) has an extra layer of complexity due to the native INTERMARC format of the records; a conversion to MARC21 has been going well and records are already appearing in WorldCat. OCLC is excited to continue working with BnF, who have previously provided assistance with the Virtual International Authority File (a.k.a.VIAF, Fichier d'Autorité International Virtuel).
The second French-language project is that of ABES (l'Agence Bibliographique de l'Enseignement Supérieur), an association of French academic libraries, bringing 8 million records to WorldCat. This project (announced in September 2009 at http://www.oclc.org/us/en/news/releases/200949.htm) builds on a long relationship with ABES. Their cataloguing system, Système Universitaire de documentation (Sudoc) is based on OCLC's Central Bibliographic System (CBS). As the September press release mentions, "Loading CBS records into WorldCat makes possible the option for real-time updates from CBS into WorldCat, via SRU update, which is currently being used effectively for the Dutch union catalogue and the union catalogue of Australia."
Both ABES and Denmark are also working with OCLC on loads of library data to WorldCat Registry, a web-based directory of libraries worldwide. (See previous Metalogue post: http://community.oclc.org/metalogue/archives/2008/10/cataloging-ourselves.html)The Registry comprehensiveness for French and Danish libraries will be greatly improved by this cooperation for inclusion of local catalog linking and other institutional data.
OCLC has many other current agreements with national libraries and other organizations. Notable among them are:
- the Slovenian COBISS.SI catalog of over 3 million records, representing the collections of over 380 libraries. Completed in October, the load of 3,129,554 records resulted in 3,063,840 records (and 4,309,068 holdings) being added - an extraordinary ratio.
- five consortia of the Swiss Informationsverbund Deutschschweiz (IDS), loading 10 million bibliographic and 16 million holdings records from Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg library systems. This project is underway.
- the Israel consortium MALMAD, representing 30 academic institutions. This is also underway.
Look for more news on these last two projects in early 2010. In the meantime, you can also watch WorldCat grow at http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/newgrow.htm. We are honored to be working with these partners on enhancing the visibility and utility of their metadata.
By: Karen Calhoun and John Chapman
Staff from OCLC's WorldCat and Metadata Services Division just finished two well-attended webinars regarding RDA (Resource Description and Access). The webinars--consisting of similar content delivered on October 27 and October 30--were designed to let the community know what we are thinking about RDA and also to gather information about what our members are doing or thinking about in relation to RDA.
OCLC has been actively participating in the process that is producing RDA through a variety of groups and task forces. In addition, cataloging staff in OCLC's cataloging services division will be participating in the testing that has been organized by the three U.S. national libraries. Hosting the webinars was a way to share ongoing work at OCLC that relates to RDA as well to gauge the level of awareness and learn about the interests of OCLC members in aspects of the new code as it emerges.
One thing that can be said with certainty: there is a huge amount of interest in RDA. These were the most widely-attended webinars that OCLC has ever held. There were 1017 webinar logins at the October 27 webinar and 832 webinar logins on October 30. Attendees--largely practitioners in U.S. libraries, doing cataloging and technical services jobs--also included staff from other types of institutions such as governmental agencies, publishers, archives and museums. Our sense is that webinar participants included not only some who frequently travel to conferences where RDA is discussed, but also many who do not generally get to travel to these events. For some, the webinar appeared to be their first exposure to RDA.
During the two webinars--to which Ted Fons, Jean Godby, Glenn Patton and I contributed content--we asked a few polling questions. Based on the webinar chat at the October 27 webinar, we revised the questions and slides somewhat for the October 30 presentation.
At the October 30 session, we asked the following questions about attitudes and preparations for RDA. The first question asked participants to choose the most important benefit from a list (all the choices are benefits that have been publicly discussed or debated by members of the library community). The following chart shows the results of the webinar polling.
The clear first choice was RDA's promise for better support of the FRBR user tasks and the objectives of the catalog as stated in section 4 of IFLA's statement of international cataloging principles. The results of this question may be of interest to anyone who cares about RDA. But I think it's especially so for those who wish to better understand what practicing catalogers believe is most important about the new rules. One may also speculate, based on these results, that the other choices--all intended outcomes of RDA adoption--are not being communicated or understood as clearly by catalogers.
The results of the second question are shown below. Because we asked people to parse out their "some combination of the above" answers, and many did, we were able to break those votes out and add them to the results. The 573 responses ended up representing 717 "votes". That is why the results add up to more than 100%.
Based on these results, catalogers' primary activities are information gathering and waiting to see what others do--suggesting early days in the process of understanding and adopting the new rules.
We are well aware that many in the library community are paying close attention to what OCLC does with respect to RDA. While it would not be appropriate for OCLC to dictate that all our cataloging members adopt RDA, we fully expect that some will, so we want to be ready. We agree with Barbara Tillett and others who speak of a "bridge" or RDA transition period during which the cataloging environment will be a hybrid one of records described under a variety of rules, evolving workflows, crosswalks and mappings. As the availability of RDA draws near, we anticipate that we'll be collaborating with a number of key partners to help introduce RDA to OCLC cataloging members.
Thanks to the many individuals who joined us for the two webinars and told us what they think and want to know about RDA. In response to requests, we're repeating the webinar "RDA and OCLC" on November 19 at 1:00 pm U.S. Eastern time. If you were unable to attend last month, we invite you to register.
