• 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.

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.   

• 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

• 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.

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. 

I've given here an overview of just some of the presentations that are particularly relevant to metadata.  There were other excellent contributions which can be found on the seminar web site.

A month into the experiment, I thought there might be intereest in an update on participation.  Registration for the Expert Community Webinars is breaking OCLC records for participation in our webinars--more than 900 sites participated in the four sessions offered in February. If you missed these, there is another Webinar on March 24 for which you can register. Alternatively, you can visit the Expert Community Web pages and click on the Webinar recording available in the right frame.  

Here are some statistics that suggest that the OCLC cataloging community is becoming more engaged in collectively improving WorldCat. The statistics compare master record improvements during the first four weeks of Expert Community Experiment activity with improvements made one year ago (March 2008).

Besides the brand new Expert Community updates to master records, it seems possible that the experiment is yielding an uplift in database enrichments and minimal-level upgrades as well. 

1. training in Next Generation concepts
2. creating new skills sets (what are they and how do we build them)
3. transitioning from traditional duties to new ones

• What do "Next Generation concepts" mean to you? Which of these are particularly relevant to technical services staff?

• What groups or individuals do you know of in the technical services community who are supplying this sort of training, assessment, and transition assistance?

The January 22 article in the Guardian is built around what OCLC regards as a false premise (that OCLC reduces libraries' visibility on the Web). It states that OCLC shares "only 3 million" records with Google Books. This is not the case. OCLC shares nearly all of the database with Google Books and Google Scholar, with the exception being a relatively small amount of data that OCLC is contractually prohibited from sharing. This allows the "find in a library" links to be placed in those services, which drives traffic back to thousands of OCLC member libraries through WorldCat.org. 

It is true that Google indexes only a subset of WorldCat records in the main index. This arrangement is based on advice from Google and is constantly reviewed. Based on recent exchanges we will move to a much more extensive crawl of the WorldCat database soon (while honoring the restrictions on some data sets that OCLC licenses from third parties).

What does not come across clearly in the article is that OCLC has for some time made WorldCat.org, the largest database in the world that represents library collections, freely available for searching on the Web, and that this allows people everywhere to do research and be connected to libraries. 

As has been discussed on this blog and elsewhere, we know that WorldCat.org can be substantially improved, and OCLC is working hard to improve the links and make more libraries' collections visible.

The statement issued by the Guardian today addresses some other ways in which the article misrepresents OCLC and its revised record use policy.

As you may know, OCLC Members Council and the OCLC Board of Trustees have jointly convened a Review Board of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship to represent the membership and inform OCLC on the principles and best practices for sharing library data. The group will discuss the revised record use policy with OCLC members and other key stakeholders. Please watch for announcements of how to provide your input.  In the meantime, comments and questions are invited at recorduse@oclc.org.