A Future for the Library Catalogue T. Hickey ACRL/DVC Bryn Mawr 3 November 2006

OCLC Research  Research for both OCLC services Membership  Metadata management  Knowledge organization  Content management  Interoperability  Systems & interaction design  ~30 employees

Reports  Melvyl Recommender Project (CDL) der/report_docs/Mellon_final.pdf der/report_docs/Mellon_final.pdf  Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration…  Future of Cataloging at Indiana University _White_Paper.pdf _White_Paper.pdf  Martha Yee: Beyond the OPAC: future directions for web- based catalogues 6.html 6.html

Influences  FRBR  Faceting  Google, Yahoo, etc.  Digital content  Ranking  Consortia  Connectivity  Remote users

Basic Approach  Go to the users Bring data to the user Make it as inviting as possible Invite their participation  Use the data we have Classification Controlled vocabularies Controlled names FRBR Usage data

OCLC’s Role  Largest consortia, largest catalog 72 million records, growing at 12 million/year 1.1 billion holdings  Open WorldCat  Relationships with Web indexers  Authority control  Data mining

General Observations  Grouping and ranking are critical  Simpler is better  Faster is better  Faceting needs to be visible  Authority control is important  Local is not as important as it was

OCLC Research  Data mining WorldCat Identities Audience level  Authority control VIAF Heading control  FRBR Algorithm xISBN  Live search  FictionFinder

WorldCat Identities  Create a page for each person in WorldCat Name(s) Works by and about Subjects Dates Fiction/non-fiction Roles Co-authors  Add links Wikipedia Authority files

Approach  Borrow from FictionFinder RedLightGreen FRBR VIAF PeopleAustralia Wikipedia  Pages are ‘static’ Easier to do complicated analysis Some parts may be editable Use cover art in lieu of photos

Statistics  80 million (nominally) controlled headings  18 million different identities in WorldCat  2 million with at least five citations  12 million with only one citation  400,000 identities with non-Latin script forms

Plans, etc.  Make WorldCat Identities public this year  Revised version of FictionFinder soon  Improve authority control  Extend authority control  Improve FRBR matching

Do We Need It?  Just have Google harvest everything Our experience with Google Fielded searching Reliable searching  Possibility of user-supplied metadata  Cost of good metadata  Cost of non-existent metadata

Conclusions  Shift to remote users forces new approaches  Online availability – trend towards centralization  More flexibility in implementations  Patrons are better served  Less emphasis on physical collections

Thom