December and January are always filled with “best of” content – lists of the music, movies, books, and television that captured our attention and won our admiration over the previous year. Well, it’s February now so we’re not going to do that. Instead, over the next several months members of the Research team are taking a retrospective look back at the OCLC Research oeuvre, highlighting work we think has stood the test of time, and discussing why these outputs were influential at the time of publication, and how, in many cases are, they remain relevant and important.
I’ve been referring to this as our Greatest Hits project, but really it’s more of a revisit of the OCLC Research back catalog. As any musician who has retained their publishing rights can tell you, there’s deep value in the back catalog. Because it is the tried-and-true jams from the back catalog that we turn to when we need them – to hype yourself up, push through the end of a work day, get through a break-up, clean the house, or have a good cry – and thus that have staying power. Certainly, OCLC Research continues to produce new work, and we are excited about it! But we are proud to have work that stands the test of time and remains useful when people need it.
So, we’ll devote some space here to the riches in our own back catalog that deserve reflection. Kate James will kick us off this month with a post about The Metadata IS the Interface: Better Description for Better Discovery of Archives and Special Collections, Synthesized from User Studies. And later we will be revisiting the golden age of report naming at OCLC Research with posts about Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration Among Libraries, Archives and Museums and Tiers for Fears: Sensible, Streamlined Sharing of Special Collections. We have all this and more in store for you. So stay tuned, don’t touch that dial.
Chela Scott Weber is a Senior Program Officer for the OCLC Research Library Partnership, where she focuses on issues related to archives, special, and distinctive collections.
Great idea! Looking forward to seeing what else you feature.