At the two most recent American Library Association conferences, I’ve met with a small ad hoc group of librarians to discuss how we might measure and demonstrate the value that sharing our collections delivers to various stake holders: researchers, library administrators, parent organizations, service/content providers. First we described our current collection sharing environment and how …
In 2012, Sustainable Collection Services (SCS) and the Michigan Shared Print Initiative (MI-SPI) undertook one of the first shared print monographs projects in the US. Seven libraries came together under the auspices of Midwest Collaborative for Library Services (MCLS) to identify and retain 736,000 monograph holdings for an initial period of 15 years. This work …
Recently Ithaka S+R published an Issue Brief entitled “Finding a Way from the Margins to the Middle: Library Information Technology, Leadership, and Culture,” by Dale Askey and Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe. Their basic premise is that library information technology as an organizational unit has been pushed to the margins, and is not as centrally positioned within …
In 2007, OCLC Research and the Society of American Archivists convened the Digitization Matters meeting to explore barriers preventing institutions from scaling up digitization of special collections. At that time, the Google Books project and the Open Content Alliance had opened a floodgate of digitization of books in libraries, which caused us to ask, what …
Institutional research information management requires the engagement and partnership of numerous stakeholders within the university or research institution. A critical stakeholder group on any campus are institutional researchers, and I encourage greater collaboration between university libraries and institutional research professionals to support research information management. Last week I had the opportunity to present a poster at the annual meeting of …
Voting is in the air! Ballots are open for both the DLF Forum / Digital Preservation 2017: and also for the “Pop up” Sessions for the Society of American Archivists. As usual, there are many excellent options. Team OCLC Research wants to share what we are learning and discuss both opportunities and challenges with the broader community …
Discussions about libraries often elevate their subject to the status of an animate being, à la “libraries are expanding their range of research support services”, or “libraries must do a better job of demonstrating their value to the campus community.” Of course, such references are merely shorthand for the sum total of activities taking place …
As you may know, the OCLC Research Library Partnership Web Archiving Metadata Working Group (WAM) has been working for the past year to draft best practices for web archiving metadata—and voila, our draft report awaits your review. The audience for these best practices includes librarians, archivists, and any others who create metadata for archived websites. Websites are idiosyncratic in …
Last week I attended Google’s annual 3-day developer conference, Google I/O, held in Mountain View, California. This event has frequently been a showcase for new Google products and ventures, some of which persist and grow (Android, the Chrome web browser, Google Photos) and others that fade (Nexus Q, Google Wave, Google Glass). This year’s event …
Unless you’ve been hiding in a remote location with no access to news or social media, you know that the topic of and discussions around “fake news” have been top of mind — not only in the media, but also within librarianship (I found numerous library guides on the topic of fake news). Since information …