30 Case Study: Library Network in USA (OCLC)
Ramesh C Gaur and Parveen Babbar
I. Objectives
• To attain knowledge about Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC), a worldwide library cooperative
• To learn about the history, governing structure and membership of OCLC.
• To be familiarized with the products and services offered by OCLC
II. Learning Outcomes
After completion of this lesson, learners would attain knowledge about Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC), a worldwide library cooperative that provides services and research to improve access to the world’s information. They would also learn history, governing structure and membership of OCLC. They would also learn about products and services offered by OCLC such as WorldCat, World Share, Library Management, Electronic Collection Management, Cataloguing and Metadata, Resource Sharing, Discovery, etc.
III. Module Structure
1. Introduction
2. History
3. Governance
3.1 Board of Trustees
3.2 OCLC Seven Committees
4. Public Rationale
5. OCLC Membership
5.1 The OCLC members share
6. OCLC Product and Services
6.1 OCLC WorldCat
6.2 WorldShare
6.3 Library Management
6.4 OCLC WorldShare Management Services- First Cooperative Management Service for Libraries
6.5 Electronic Collection Management
6.6 Digital Collection Management
6.7 Cataloguing and Metadata
6.8 Resource Sharing
6.9 Discovery
7. Summary
8. References
1. Introduction
Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC) founded in 1967 is a worldwide library cooperative, owned, governed and sustained by members. It was originally named as Ohio College Library Center and it connects libraries to manage, control and share the world’s knowledge and is dedicated to the values of librarianship through cooperation, resource sharing and public service.
OCLC is guided by librarians through a 16-member Board of Trustees, who are elected by regional councils of OCLC member libraries. The EMEA region has its own Regional Council and has 11 delegates on its Executive Committee from libraries representing the entire region.
2. History
The OCLC was formed in 1967 with a small group of library leaders who had a vision that working together will give them way out to the solutions to the pressing issues faced by the libraries. These leaders had an opinion that combining of computer technology with library cooperation will increase the standards and will reduce the cost. This lead to the vision of shared, online cataloguing. The vision and thoughts came true with years and today OCLC is connected to 25,900 libraries, archives and museums from 170 countries around the world and is believed to be world’s largest library organization. The OCLC is known for collaboration and mirrors the culture of innovation and cooperation.
3. Governance
3.1 Board of Trustees
The OCLC is governed by the Board comprising of 16 Trustees members from academic, public, state and national libraries who work to align OCLC’s product, research and advocacy strategies with OCLC’s mission and ensure that OCLC remains a strong collaborative.
The OCLC Board of Trustees have 4 years term and the board comprises of
• Six trustees from OCLC Global Council
• Nine trustees elected by the Board itself
o Four from the library community
o Five from fields outside librarianship.
Budgets, audits and other reports are approved by the Trustees who ensure that OCLC remains economically and financially secure and true to its public purpose. The Board also supports a culture of cooperation and dynamic debates between its members. The OCLC board is always open to the potential opportunities, partnerships, acquisition proposals to achieve the mission and vision of OCLC.
3.2 OCLC Seven Committees
OCLC Board of Trustees have the responsibility of handling the specific functions through its 7 committees. These include:
1. Audit Committee -The Committee assesses the performance of independent auditors, reviews auditors, there plans and processes. The committee assesses annual audit financial statements and also oversees risk assessment and mitigation arrangements for the future.
2. Executive Committee – This Executive committee manages the affairs of the OCLC when the board session is expired.
3. Finance and Investment Committee – The committee is accountable for the supervision of the financial health of OCLC. The finance and investment committee assesses annual budget plans, its interim and annual financial results. It also consider and grant the approval of loans, capital expenditures, amalgamations, mergers, acquirements, acquisitions, dispositions and sanctioning of special budgets and expenditures. The policies relating to long-term investment and banking resolutions are also reviewed by this committee.
4. Board Governance Committee –This committee is responsible for internal affairs and self assessment of the Board.
5. Personnel and Compensation Committee– The committee looks into the matters of management performance, employee reimbursement and compensation. It takes care of personnel policies of OCLC, management improvement, development and continuity plans of the future.
6. Membership Committee –The committee assesses, regulate and regularly updates membership and governance protocols and policies for determining the membership procedure and guidelines.
7. Technology Planning Committee – The committee explores the new emerging technologies and its implementation that can bare well-suited to helping libraries better serve their user communities.
4. Public Rationale
The public rationale of OCLC is commitment to each other, which involves working together to improve access and availability to the information around the libraries of the world. Another rationale related to this is to reduce the costs and expenditure of the libraries by the mechanism of collaboration.
The Public Rationale Involved is:
• Establishing, maintaining and operating a computerized library network;
• Promotion of usage of libraries internally by the patrons and promotion of librarianship as a whole in the profession;
• Providing processes and products for the advantage and benefits of library patrons and libraries;
• Enhancing the availability of library resources and documents to individual library users around the world;
• Providing the cost volume profit analysis through reducing the expenditure of library by per-unit costs; and
• Ease of access to educational information and knowledge by providing scientific literature of the world.
5. OCLC Membership
Institution qualifies to become OCLC member by doing one or more of the following on ongoing basis:
1. Sharing intellectual content and/or participating in global resource or reference sharing through the subscription or contract for an OCLC system; or
2. Contributing to the intellectual content or participating in global resource or reference sharing through an OCLC system provided by another organization, such as a local or regional cooperative or consortium, a state or provincial library, or a national library; or
3. Subscribing or contracting for an OCLC library management system that will facilitate global sharing when transitioned to WorldShare.
5.1 The OCLC members share
OCLC members share in a variety of ways:
• Metadata contribution by the member libraries,
• Sharing authority records to WorldCat;
• Contributing and sharing its library holdings information;
• Sharing personnel resources and expertise, such as in a reference cooperative;
• Provisioning the availability of digital content among the members;
• Contributing and sharing materials through OCLC based services;
• Subscribing or contracting for an OCLC library management system that facilitates global sharing when transitioned to WorldShare.
6. OCLC Product and Services
OCLC provides a range of products and services to support the libraries and its collections:
6.1 OCLC WorldCat
The OCLC WorldCat provides a hub for services and data with provision of application supporting libraries to find anything held in library collections around the world, effectively, efficiently and quickly. It helps in getting spontaneous and insightful access to the comprehensive collection of the wealth of resources. The service also connects library users to millions of electronic resources and documents, including electronic books, subscription based licensed databases, online serials, periodicals and numerous other collections of digital items. The collection of Worldcat in November 2013 showed 311 million items comprising 2.1 billion holdings in 486 languages comprising 39.8% in English Language and rest 60.2% in non English languages.
i. History of WorldCat
The service was started in 1971 with the addition of first bibliographic records to the OCLC Online Union Catalog, by OCLC staff at the Alden Library at Ohio University. OCLC began the “Open WorldCat” in 2003 with the pilot program. It provided the abbreviated records from the subset of WorldCat and was made available to its associate partner web sites and booksellers and thus increase the accessibility of the collection of member libraries. The web based search facility was made available in 2006 by the WorldCat and thus become a most popular service in the world over the years now.
The Collection of WorldCat comprises of (as of in Nov 2013):
With the changing time OCLC WorldCat is expanding with the new type of data ranging from:
• E-Journals and E-books;
• Subscribed digital licensed materials;
• Open Access data resources;
• Institutional and repositories data;
• Collection of special importance and characteristics;
• Publishers and Vendor Records;
• Clients, Users and Patron data;
• Information of libraries like opening, closing hours, library rules and lending policies;
• transactional and workflow data relating to library acquisitions and circulations data;
• Data related to resolver transactions and knowledge base transactions;
• Data searching;
• Interlibrary loan and lending data.
At present nearly 72000 libraries represent the Worldcat and every 10 seconds a record is added. It is calculated that every 4 seconds a request is made through WorldCat Resource Sharing and every second First search is done through WorldCat.
ii National Library participation in the OCLC global cooperative: WorldCat encourages the world National Libraries to participate in this global cooperation as it expose the richness of their collections by adding national files, digital images of national importance, national bibliographies and more. This also increases the visibility of cultural heritages, increases national identity and accomplishes world culture with Web searchers through WorldCat. At present 44 national libraries are connected to WorldCat and nearly 80 million holdings are provided by them. The history of WorldCat shows that the first international agreement with OCLC was signed in 1978 with the National Library of the Netherlands. Later, after seven years the British Library became the first national library outside the U.S., i.e. in 1985 to begin contributing records to WorldCat.
iii. WorldCat Knowledge Base: With the changing time the WorldCat knowledge base has come up which combines data with digital and electronic collections and have the features that provide access links to the e-content. This leads to more accurate and timely access to resources. The service also provides management of WorldCat holdings and delivery of WorldCat MARC records for all e-resources and materials. The service also ensures that the metadata and access links to the URLs of the e-Content are continuously updated. The WorldCat has also come up with Integrated link resolution, OpenURL resolution and A to Z list. Thus facilitate faster, quicker and easy resource sharing of e-content with higher performance rates.
6.2 WorldShare
OCLC WorldShare is a cloud based software platform with a set of integrated applications which provides the supportive technical infrastructure where WorldCat data and WorldShare applications work together. WorldShare provides web-based integrated set of library management applications that eradicate conventional silos and deliver more effectively and efficiency to the staff. The applications which come under it are
i. WorldShare Management Services gives single window access to acquisitions, circulation, license management to subscribed data and metadata activities. It coordinates impeccably with user- friendly discovery based delivery service.
ii. WorldShare Interlibrary Loan Services makes it easier, faster and saves time to diverse resource sharing centralised functions in one place.
iii. WorldShare Metadata provides the metadata at the collection level.
iv. WorldShare License Manager comprises of link resolution, subscription based information, licenses and publisher/vendor rights management.
v. WorldShare Platform is for the librarians who can do programming. It provides technical support to the librarians who can use Data services, Application Programme Interfaces and developer tools to incorporate WorldShare services and WorldCat data into other library applications and library management services.
6.3 Library Management
OCLC provides in-house deployed and cloud-based library management systems to more than 9,000 libraries in United States, Europe, Australia and Africa which have the functionality of Acquisitions, circulation, inter-library loan and cataloguing. Some of the Library Management Systems (LMS) used includes:
i. Amlib is an Austrian based library management system which is implemented in school, public and special libraries primarily in Australia, Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. The LMS is completely web based with all modules.
ii. Bibliotheca is one of very popular German based OCLC management systems serving over 4000 public libraries in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
iii. Local Library System (LBS) is also a Web-based library management system for the academic libraries used in more than
200 academic and college libraries of the Netherlands and Germany.
iv. OLIB has been used in governmental, corporate, health and further education libraries in the UK and Europe.
v. SISIS – SunRise is a management system for academic libraries in the German-speaking region.
6.4 OCLC WorldShare Management Services– First Cooperative Management Service for Libraries
To overcome the work difficulties and moving with the time OCLC is phasing out traditional ILS systems. It is incorporating the modern technologies and enabling libraries to share infrastructure costs and resources, and further collaborate in ways that frees them from the restrictions of local physical hardware and software applications.
This Service provides a cohesive and unified Web-based environment that streamlines cataloguing, circulations, acquisitions and license management. It offers a powerful discovery and delivery tool for library users. The benefits of OCLC WorldShare Management Services include Shared Data, Web Based Service, Cost Benefits, Increased Efficiencies, Simplified Workflows, Time Savings, Discovery and use of different Apps.
6.5 Electronic Collection Management
OCLC works with libraries, publishers and other partners to get e-books, licensed e-resources and digital items to enable the management, discovery and access of e-resources right alongside physical materials. It provides various services under this category
i. WorldShare Acquisition (Unified acquisitions for physical and electronic collections) – It provides all the acquisition functions including the WorldCat, Publishers Data, Vendor Data, Order Data, Holdings, and Knowledge Base.
ii. WorldShare License Manager (Reduce the complexity of managing licenses )– This service manages the license agreements, rights, access and resolution to full text from the same interface and eliminate the need to synchronise data across multiple interfaces.
iii. WorldShare Collection Manager (Get Metadata and automatic updates for all subscriptions) – The service provides WorldCat records and holdings for licensed, digital and physical materials. The OCLC regularly updates the data for all titles and access URLs which enhances discovery of e-content.
iv. Ezproxy (Ensures users can access everything anywhere) – EZproxy is a popular service which provide users with remote based web access to licensed and subscription based content. It is middleware solution that validates and authenticates library patrons/users against local authentication systems like IPs. The service provides offsite access to licensed content, based on the user’s authorisation at a physical remote location.
6.6 Digital Collection Management
OCLC offers to provide support for the digital life cycle, including managing, sharing and conserving primary source documents and materials through a range of solutions for digital photos, audio/video files, documents, newspapers, maps or any combination of materials.
i. CONTENTdm – It is digital collection management software which handle the storage, management and delivery of collections in any format and make these digital collections available on the Web to the users.
ii. WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway – OCLC provides a self service based utility tool for uploading the metadata of electronic/digital content to WorldCat and maximizes Web visibility of primary source materials via WorldCat.
6.7 Cataloguing and Metadata
OCLC provides a comprehensive service that work together to streamline technical processing, improve results and sustains quality with international standards for cataloguing and metadata.
i. Connexion – OCLC supports copy and original cataloguing, enabling libraries to interactively create, generate, retrieve, edit, amend and share WorldCat bibliographic and authority records. It also maintains WorldCat holdings data.
ii. Accessions – This service supplies digital/ electronic list of recently catalogued acquisitions.
iii. Z39.50 Cataloguing – It enables and provides Z39.50-compliant interface to the libraries through their local cataloguing system. It helps the libraries in searching and retrieving records from WorldCat for copy cataloguing.
iv. WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway – Collection Gateway is a self-service utility tool for uploading the metadata for library’s electronic/digital content to WorldCat.
v. CatExpress – This CatExpress is a service for the small collection libraries and for those libraries which need an easy-to-use Web based interface for its library personnel’s with very less or no cataloguing experience, to perform copy cataloguing.
vi. OCLC WorldShare Management Services – It manages the acquisitions of the libraries and enables them to maintain WorldCat holdings data from within the acquisitions interface as and when items are received at the library.
vii. OCLC WorldShare Metadata –OCLC provides a comprehensive and inclusive metadata management solution for physical resources, licensed subscriptions and electronic/ digital resources having manifold formats. These records are maintained in MARC for holdings in the WorldCat knowledge base.
viii. Dewey Services – OCLC provide a world renowned dynamic structure for the organization and classification of library collections. Dewey Decimal Classification is provided online by OCLC and its updates are integrated as soon as they happen through quarterly, electronic updates to WebDewey and Abridged WebDewey.
ix. Terminologies Service – Terminology services provides access to multiple controlled vocabularies which help the libraries in creating reliable and consistent metadata for library collections.
x. WorldCat Selection – WorldCat Selection simplifies and streamlines the selection of the resources and acquisition process relating ordering, receiving, invoicing for new library materials. WorldCat carry the corresponding WorldCat records related to it.
xi. WorldCat Cataloguing Partners – Cataloguing data provides vendor acquisition data and shelf arrangement data like the classification number, barcodes and call numbers for materials. Member libraries can order through participating vendor and sets the holdings information automatically in WorldCat.
xii. Batch load – Batch load enables addition and deletion of huge numbers of records and holdings in a single instance either offline or online. The service adds new records information to WorldCat and updates the holdings information and Local record Holdings for items a library holds.
xiii. WorldCat Collection Sets – WorldCat collection provides vendor sets and collection sets in microform and electronic format. These sets can be easily uploaded into the local systems of the libraries for usage.
xiv. Contract Cataloging – WorldCat also provides consultancy and contract services at multiple levels of cataloguing. These services are available in various formats and in more than 30 languages. The services includes copy cataloguing, record creation, physical processing of records.
6.8 Resource Sharing
OCLC provide users with the complete and comprehensive database of bibliographic and library ownership information and worldwide access to resources in member library collections.
i. WorldShare Interlibrary loan – OCLC WorldShare Interlibrary Loan is a new upcoming service that will replace WorldCat Resource Sharing subscription on 19 May, 2014. This service will provide multiple operations and systems, and provide new utility and functionality. It will speed up the fulfilment of interlibrary loan requests and saves time of staff, users/ patrons and clients. It will change the face of conventional interlibrary loan and will provide a truly integrated delivery solution. The service integrates discovery and delivery of digital, electronic and print materials within a single platform interface.
ii. WorldCat Resource Sharing – It is an effective and efficient inter-library lending utility tool that simplifies library workflows. The resource sharing connects information seekers to materials in more than 10,000 libraries in around 40 countries. This service will be closed after the launch of WorldShare Interlibrary loan.
6.9 Discovery
WorldCat Discovery Services will be launched in March 2014 with cloud-based applications interface that will bring the FirstSearch and WorldCat Local services together. Discovery will enable the users to discover digital, electronic and physical resources in libraries around the world. It will provide a single search interface to both WorldCat and a central index of nearly 2,000 e-content collections. The service will provide an interface that will automatically adjusts for desktops, tablets and mobile. Further it will also have direct link resolution to full-text resources with the library’s e-content subscriptions for libraries that maintain their holdings in WorldCat
i. WorldCat.org – It is an online web based portal to the WorldCat global catalog with a supporting program of data syndication. The portal makes library’s collection of the member libraries virtually discoverable anywhere on the Web 24X7.
ii. WorldCat Local – It is a webscale discovery solution that delivers single-search-box access to more than 1.7 billion items from the world’s library collections. It includes 1.4 billion full text articles, more than 39 million digital items from sources like Google Books, OAIster and Hathi Trust.
iii. FirstSearch – FirstSearch provides access to a core collection of reference based databases and includes WorldCat as well as other databases like CAMIO, Electronic Books and OAIster. WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local users can access FirstSearch databases through a user friendly one stop search box.
iv. QuestionPoint – QuestionPoint is a reference management service that provides libraries to interact with patrons and clients in multiple ways like through online chat and email. The Web-based tools enable seamless integration of chat and email reference which can help in referral and reference services.
7. Summary
OCLC always has been a worldwide library cooperative which provides services and research to improve access to the world’s information. Now it has come up with a new set of cloud-based applications that brings collectively the FirstSearch and WorldCat Local services at one place. It enables discovery of more than 1.7 billion digital, electronic and physical resources in libraries around the world through one stop single search to both WorldCat and the central index. OCLC has been always committed to offer library users and library staff access to rich, global bibliographic content and enable information seekers from mutually subscribing libraries to search authoritative sources. Direct Link Resolution and Inter Library Loan had been the integral part of OCLC services. Last but not the least OCLC cooperative is facilitating libraries in defining their place in the modern digital world with latest Webscale services that amplify and enhance library cooperation even further.
8. References
1. OCLC-http://oclc.org/
2. OCLC Video – http://www.youtube.com/user/OCLCVideo
3. WorldCat-http://www.worldcat.org/
4. QuestionPoint-http://www.questionpoint.org/
5. FirstSearch-http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch.en.html
6. Contentdm–http://www.contentdm.org/