Metalogue is a forum for sharing thoughts on all things related to knowledge organization by and for libraries, hosted by Karen Calhoun, Vice President, WorldCat and Metadata Services for OCLC.
Karen will be joined often by friends and colleagues from all over the globe who will contribute perspectives and experiences about the current and future state of cataloging and metadata.
OCLC blogs provide unvetted, OCLC staff commentary on the library landscape and beyond from a variety of viewpoints, looking for news, ideas and other information of potential interest to the library community.
OCLC's membership magazine, NextSpace #9 features library mash ups in its cover story, Mixing it up: Libraries mash up content, services and ideas.
Cover story
Mixing it up
One of the fastest growing trends today is combining data and functionality from several sources to create new services that provide a unique user experience. They’re called mash ups. Think Google Maps. Yahoo Pipes. Facebook Plug-Ins. Libraries are doing Web mash ups as well: Meebo Instant Messaging. Library Lookup. Bookburro. And, in a way, they’ve been doing all kinds of mash ups for years. Think story hour, open-shelf access, cafes, book lockers.
Advocacy
From Awareness to Funding
Since November 2006, OCLC has been engaged in a public library advocacy research project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to evaluate the potential impact of a nationwide library support campaign. What we found out may surprise you.
Products and services
Moving discovery and delivery to the network
Despite steady advances in information access technologies, fragmented search and discovery systems in libraries have challenged information seekers’ abilities to find the resources they need. WorldCat Local breaks down silos and aggregates collections with a simple, locally branded interface.
OCLC is delighted to announce that Natural England has successfully implemented and is now live with the OLIB library management system in a project that took less than eight weeks to complete.
Natural England went live with their library service using the newly integrated system thanks to the swift response of the OCLC operations team. The team delivered implementation services, data conversion from the legacy systems and data load including MARC import. They also provided application and technical support, training and mentoring to new and existing OLIB users and project management. The result is an OLIB system that meets the needs of Natural England in their role of managing natural resources, enhancing biodiversity, landscapes, wildlife and access to the countryside.
Natural England has been an enthusiastic user of OLIB since 2002. They decided to migrate another incumbent library management system into OLIB for a number of reasons, including its thesaurus and image handling capabilities.
This successful project owed a lot to good communications maintained between all areas of the project. The OCLC staff worked well with other key project areas, to ensure that the migration completed on time. OCLC's contribution included: support in addressing all technical issues as they arose, their flexibility to meet the requirements of the client, and availability always to work at client location, as was required by this project.
"Since launching the integrated data on OLIB, our customers can now enjoy a more seamless experience with greater visibility to our information holdings across the organisation. Using just one system is a big advantage for the library staff and they are enjoying OLIB's flexibility", says Peter Wingate, Team Leader, Knowledge Management & Information Services, Natural England.
Learn more about OLIB
Librarians' Toolbox:
