OCLC
acquires remaining shares
of OCLC PICA
OCLC, the world's
largest library cooperative, has acquired the remaining shares of
OCLC PICA Group B.V., the European-based library and information
systems supplier, to become the sole shareholder of the organisation.
OCLC acquired 60 percent
of the Pica organisation in 2000. This purchase of the remaining
40 percent in OCLC PICA completes the acquisition of shares. Rein
van Charldorp will remain in his current position as Managing Director
of OCLC PICA. Full details of the announcement are here.
OCLC
opens office in Beijing
OCLC has opened an office
in Beijing to better serve the growing information needs of libraries
and other cultural heritage institutions in China and other parts
of Asia.
OCLC officially opened
the Beijing office with a grand-opening celebration on July 20 with
more than 150 leaders from libraries and other institutions in China
attending. OCLC colleagues from Japan, Korea, Taiwan and
Thailand also were in attendance. The OCLC office is located
in Zhong Guan Cun, the academic centre of Beijing, often called "the
Silicon Valley of China." Qiu Dongjiang, OCLC Chief Representative,
is joined by three other OCLC staff members in the Beijing office.
CEO Jay Jordan opens the OCLC Beijing office.
OCLC's relationship with
libraries in the People's Republic of China began in 1986, when
OCLC introduced its CJK system for cataloguing Chinese, Japanese
and Korean materials. An OCLC Service Centre was established
at Tsinghua University in 1996, and access to the OCLC FirstSearch
online reference service was made available to about 100 academic
institutions in China. In 2004, the CALIS (China Academic
Library and Information System) consortium, under the leadership
of Beijing University, began providing access to a NetLibrary eBook
collection for 80 libraries in China.
UnityUK
data improvement programme
to be rolled out
OCLC PICA, in partnership
with The Combined Regions (TCR), has completed the roll-out of phase
one of a series of enhancements that improve the quality and the
breadth of data available through the UnityUK national resource
sharing service. This is part of a rolling programme of work to
continually improve UnityUK.
Data cleaning
The data that was imported
from the former UnityWeb service has been cleaned. Records have
been de-duplicated, in one case, a single ISBN was present no less
than 40 times. Furthermore, non-existing items have been removed
and (where necessary) data within each record has been moved to
the appropriate MARC field. As a result of this project, in excess
of 3,300,000 records have had their data made more consistent with
MARC rules.
Data loading
Data from the catalogues
of the Royal National Institute for the Blind, National Library
for the Blind, CALIBRE and The Torch Trust will be loaded into UnityUK.
Finally, complete database
loads have been carried out for around 70 UnityUK member libraries
and 8 million high-quality British Library records, with holdings,
will be loaded over the summer.
WorldCat
Registry more global with the help of national libraries
Since its launch earlier
this year, the WorldCat Registry continues to help libraries manage
and share essential data that defines their organisations, such
as institution type, location, URLs for electronic services, circulation
statistics and population served. National libraries in Australia,
New Zealand and South Africa recently agreed to load their files
into the WorldCat Registry, enhancing and extending the global reach
of this web-based directory.
OCLC have just completed loading
1,200 records from the National Library of South Africa and is preparing
to load more than 8,000 records from the National Library of Australia.
"The trend to globalisation
has shone a spotlight on humble directory data, in the form of records
which describe library organisations and their systems," says
Debbie Campbell, Director, Collaborative Services Branch, NLA. "The NLA is pleased to be able to contribute the Australian
Libraries Gateway metadata to the WorldCat Registry project, as
more of this type of metadata is surfaced in open registries to
support the global information network.
Adds Lorcan Dempsey, Vice
President, OCLC Programs and Research and Chief Strategist, "As
our networked environment becomes richer, so does the need to provide
'intelligence' about the entities in that environment. Metadata
about libraries, and their collections, services and policies are
now scattered across many systems and services. The aim of
the Registry is to consolidate as much of that data as possible,
making the network work much more effectively for libraries and
their users. Once data about an institution and its services
is available, it may be used by many others. The registry
is available as a web site for human lookup. More importantly
it is designed for other applications to use as a source of information."
The
registry is open to all libraries and consortia inside and outside
the OCLC cooperative. View it at: http://worldcat.org/registry/institutions
Frankfurt
Bookfair Preview
OCLC PICA's focus at this
year's Bookfair will be on the current high-profile issues of eContent
and digitisation. This focus will reflect in presentations
we will be offering at our booth, as well as at the Fair's "Innovator's
Forum".
Wednesday,
October 10, from 17.00-18.00
Title:
"Extending the Value of your Digital
Content through OCLC Services"
OCLC offers
publishers and librarians services for managing and providing access
to digital collections, including CONTENTdm, NetLibrary, WorldCat.org
and WorldCat Collection Analysis. Learn how these services
can increase the value of your collections and about OCLC's future
directions in content management services.
Presenter:
Chip Nilges - OCLC Vice President, Business Development
Friday,
October 12, from 16.45-17.15
Title:
"Are Libraries Missing your Stuff? Collection Analysis for Publishers"
OCLC knows
the titles that are owned by over 20,000 libraries worldwide.
Using the Publisher Collection Analysis service will significantly
reduce the tedious work of accessing online library catalogs to
determine which libraries own (or don't own) your titles and help
publishers make informed decisions about marketing and sales to
libraries.
Presenter: Glenda
Lammers, OCLC Product Manager, Business Intelligence
OCLC PICA's stand number
is: Hall 4.2, M437.
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WorldCat
Local service coming soon
OCLC is piloting a new service that allows libraries to
combine the cooperative power of OCLC member libraries worldwide
with the ability to customise WorldCat.org as a solution for local
discovery and delivery services.
The service adds value
to the investments libraries have already made in adding their collections
to WorldCat by adding local branding and relevancy to front-end
search capabilities and integrated access to local delivery options.
OCLC will examine results of the pilot to determine a production
schedule.
The WorldCat Local pilot
builds on WorldCat.org, which provides Web access to the world’s
richest database for discovery of materials held in libraries. The
service offers Web-based WorldCat.org features designed for the
end user such as cover art, faceted browse capability, evaluative
content, result sets that bring multiple versions of a work together
under one record, citation formatting options and relevancy ranking
of search results—all configured for a local view of the home
library.
WorldCat Local will offer libraries the ability to search the entire
WorldCat database with results displaying items that are most accessible
to the library user—such as collections from the home library,
collections shared in a consortium and open access collections—all
through a single search box in a locally branded interface. The
WorldCat Local service interoperates with locally maintained services
like circulation, resource sharing and resolution to full text to
create a seamless experience for the end user. WorldCat Local will
also include future enhancements to WorldCat.org including social
networking services.
Libraries and groups participating
in the WorldCat Local pilot include: University of Washington, Ohio
State University Libraries, 12 libraries in the Peninsula Library
System in California, and 11 multitype libraries in Illinois. See
the University of Washington’s implementation at
http://uwashington.worldcat.org.
National
Library of Australia load records in WorldCat
 The National Library of Australia has agreed to add some 12 million
bibliographic records to WorldCat, the world’s largest database
of catalogued items held in libraries, making these records visible
to Web searchers worldwide. Australian libraries will use WorldCat
to catalogue, find and share library materials.
“The National Library of Australia looks forward to working
closely with OCLC through this collaborative services agreement
which opens up access to WorldCat for Australian libraries. This
agreement marks a major step forward in the sharing of Australian
bibliographic data and exposure of the collections of Australian
libraries internationally,” said Jan Fullerton, Australian
National Library Director General.
University
of Lancaster buy QuestionPoint
The University of Lancaster
has purchased QuestionPoint, the virtual reference solution from
OCLC PICA. QuestionPoint will enable Lancaster's 12,000 students
to gain access to library expertise via a single information point.
The solution will offer modern communication methods such as chat
and co-browse, in addition to the more traditional e-mail and web
form options.
"What we wanted was a
single point of access to Library expertise and help. A service
that could be embedded alongside other University services and a
service where the user did not have to think about who they should
contact about a particular question or problem. QuestionPoint will
enable us to deliver such a service." comments Michael Dunne, Systems
Librarian.
During the 73rd IFLA General Conference in Durban, South Africa, at which also a number of OCLC PICA and OCLC speakers contributed to the programme, OCLC together with OCLC PICA hosted a well attended reception on 21 August in the Wreck Aquarium at uShaka Marine World, Durban. We were very pleased to welcome so many known and new faces.
WorldCat.org
Update
OCLC have announced two new features in WorldCat.org.
OCLC has added article-level citation records to WorldCat.org search
results from four leading databases: GPO, ArticleFirst, Medline
and ERIC. Now a broad base of Web users performing searches at WorldCat.org
can discover article citations as well as relevant WorldCat records
for books, audio and video recordings, and other content formats.
And, WorldCat.org has been enhanced with a social-networking feature:
Users across the Web can now add individual items catalogued in
WorldCat to personalized lists. They can group items owned by their
library and other libraries, and share their lists with friends,
colleagues and millions of site users.
Users can add any book, video, article or another item to a list
right from its WorldCat record, or use the checkboxes and "Save
to" button in WorldCat search results.
New
faces in the Paris office
The OCLC PICA office in Paris, from which we serve our customers in France
and other countries around the Mediterranean, has recently welcomed
Christian C. Négrel as the regional sales manager and Patricia
Caillet as sales and marketing support.
Chris has more than 15
years in library technology and library automation software, Patricia
worked for seven years with a technical information provider. Sébastien
Valley, who has been with OCLC PICA in Paris for two years, is now
account manager.
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