Karen Calhoun, Senior Associate University Librarian for Information Technology and Technical Services at Cornell University Library, has joined the OCLC leadership team as Vice President, OCLC WorldCat and Metadata Services.
Ms. Calhoun will join OCLC effective May 14. The move was part of a reorganization at OCLC designed to achieve global integration of services provided by the world’s largest library cooperative.
Ms. Calhoun is no stranger to OCLC – she worked for OCLC from 1986 through 1996, serving in the OCLC Library Resources Management Division before joining Cornell. Since joining Cornell in January 1997, she held a number of positions in the Library, with her most recent promotion to Senior Associate University Librarian in October 2006.
Active professionally in research and as a speaker, Ms. Calhoun was principal investigator for The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools, a Library of Congress-commissioned study on the future of the catalogue. The report, released in March 2006, challenges assumptions about the traditional library catalogue and proposes new directions for the research library catalogue in the digital era.
“Karen Calhoun is an internationally respected librarian and thought leader, and we’re confident that her expertise and vision will be instrumental in continuing to build WorldCat and extend its global reach. She will lead OCLC’s efforts to chart a course for the future of cataloguing and metadata services,” said Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO.
“OCLC is stepping up to the challenges of the digital age and helping libraries around the world find new ways to excel,” said Ms. Calhoun. “The chance to work with the OCLC global leadership team is tremendously exciting to me.”
The WorldCat database continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with millions of records entered into the world’s largest bibliographic resource coming from outside the United States. In the past several years, OCLC has added international files from the National Library of Germany’s bibliography, Dutch Union Catalogue, LinkUK, Toronto Public Library, University of Manitoba, University of Gutting, National Library of Education in Denmark, the National Union Catalogue of Poland, and more. OCLC expects to process more than 38 million records from outside the United States in 2007, including national bibliographies from New Zealand and Sweden, to name a couple.
For more information, please contact OCLC PICA Communications by e-mail or by telephone at +31-(0)71-524 65 00.
