OCLC newsletter

              O C L C

N E W S L E T T E R

N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 1 I S S N : 0 1 6 3 - 8 9 8 X N O . 2 5 4

November/ December 2001 No. 254

Editor in chief:

Nita Dean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . nita_ dean@ oclc. org

Editor:

George Promenschenkel . . . . . . . promensg@ oclc. org

Assistant Editors:

Bob Murphy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . bob_ murphy@ oclc. org

Christopher Barton . . . . . . . . . . . . . bartonc@ oclc. org

Editorial Assistant:

Jennifer Hamilton . . . . . . . jennifer_ hamilton@ oclc. org

Cover Design: Linda Shepard

Art Production: Tammy Miller

Desktop Publishing: Lithokraft II

All photos taken by Rich Skopin unless

otherwise noted.

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Correspondents:

Robert C. Bolander

Kay Covert

Libbie Crawford

Diane Vizine- Goetz

Shirley Hyatt

Dawn Lawson

Hans- Jörg Lieder

Joan S. Mitchell

Winston Tabb

C O N T E N T S

Membership News

OCLC Members Council welcomes new delegates, discusses partnerships

in building the worldwide library cooperative

Team effort results in 48 millionth WorldCat record for

Southern Illinois University

Sacred Heart Major Seminary makes 111 millionth OCLC ILL request

OCLC Marketing vice president named

OCLC makes offer to purchase assets of netLibrary

MALVINE and LEAF projects promote library sharing in Europe

Third ARL/ OCLC Strategic Issues Forum scheduled for February

OCLC Language Sets expanded

OCLC meetings at ALA Midwinter 2002

OCLC Institute to host seminars at ALA Midwinter

OCLC Institute to present “ Steering by Standards” videoconference series

OCLC Canada staff settled in new office

OCLC Canada and the CLA announce Northern Exposure to Leadership

Institute Award winner

OCLC Statistics

Ingram Library Services and OCLC to provide prerelease video cataloging

information

OCLC to collaborate with National Library of Australia to provide gateway

to WorldCat for small libraries

WorldCat now contains more than 500,000 records for digital resources

“ Ohio Dinners for Spectrum” raises funds, consciousness

Research

OCLC researchers find slowdown in web growth

Dublin Core Metadata Element Set approved

as ANSI Standard Z39.85- 2001

Kathleen Braverman discusses the impact of linguistic dialects

on the workplace

Dewey Research: New Uses for the DDC

Dewey turns 125

Dewey Decimal Classification: 125 and still growing

Dewey’s 125th anniversary celebrated at IFLA

The Library of Congress and the DDC

You’ve come a long way, Dewey!

People, Places & Things introduced

Product News

OCLC announces enhancements to WorldCat in FirstSearch

Enhancements to OCLC ArticleFirst

Alibris/ WorldCat link first of many planned

Offline services automate routine cataloging tasks

OCLC offers OpenURL option for libraries

Internet lists deliver news to the desktop

News briefs and links

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MAKING DEWEY

“ EVER MORE WIDELY USEFUL”

F R O M J A Y J O R D A N

A s we celebrate the 125th anniversary

of the Dewey Decimal Classification

system in this issue of the OCLC

Newsletter, a bit of history is in order.

Melvil Dewey created his innovative

classification system in 1873 and first

published it in 1876. He established Forest

Press in 1911 to edit, publish and distribute

the classification. Since then, the system has

been continuously revised and expanded

through numerous editions.

From the beginning, Melvil Dewey was

very particular about the care and feeding of

his creation. In 1924, when he transferred

the copyrights for the DDC to Forest Press

and the Lake Placid Foundation, he stipulated

that this endeavor should “ never become a

mere money- making corporation.”

As a result, in 1988, when the Lake Placid

Education Foundation approached OCLC

about acquiring the rights to the DDC, the

parties had to get approval from the New

York Supreme Court. Mr. Dewey had also

expressed the wish that revenues from the

DDC should be employed to make the

system,“ ever more widely useful.”

Since OCLC Forest Press came into being

in 1988, there have been 20th and 21st

editions of the DDC, 12th and 13th abridged

editions, and three electronic versions. The

DDC has been translated into 30 languages.

It is now in use in over 200,000 libraries in

135 countries. It is truly a global resource

for librarians and library users. The DDC

has indeed come a long way, and yet, it is

apparent that we have just begun to tap

its usefulness.

On this 125th anniversary, I would like to

thank and acknowledge the generations of

editors and librarians who have continued to

make the DDC a dynamic, living classification

tool. I would also like to congratulate Joan

Mitchell, the OCLC Forest Press staff and

the current editorial staff at the Library

of Congress on this anniversary. Their

leadership and dedication continue

to make the DDC “ ever more widely useful.”

Mr. Dewey would be very proud indeed.

Jay Jordan

President and Chief Executive Officer

OCLC

The OCLC Members Council welcomed new dele-gates

from six countries and discussed plans,

directions and partnerships in building the world-wide

library cooperative Oct. 7– 9 at OCLC in

Dublin, Ohio.

It was the first of three regularly scheduled

three- day meetings for the 2001/ 02 Members

Council term with the dual themes of “ OCLC

Strategic Plans and Business Directions” and

“ Old Friends and New Partners: Building the

Worldwide Library Cooperative.”

OCLC Members Council was formerly known

as the OCLC Users Council. Under bylaws

adopted May 21, the Users Council changed its

name to Members Council and added six new del-egates

from outside the United States to better

define its role in strategic planning and extend

global representation.

Members Council welcomed new delegates

from the Netherlands, Japan, South Africa, France,

Mexico and China who will serve for the next

three years while a group of representatives from

council, the OCLC Board of Trustees, regional net-works

and service centers continue work on a

new policy to help define new standards for

membership and council representation.

“ Our goal is to reach into the international

community and enhance the meaning of OCLC as

a global library membership cooperative,” said

Jerry Stephens, OCLC Members Council president

and librarian and director, Mervyn H. Sterne

Library, University of Alabama– Birmingham, in his

opening remarks. “ Similar to the first meeting of

Users Council

23 years ago, we

are embarking

on an expanded

partnership,

one in which

Members Council

will play an even

more significant

role as we move

upstream in

the planning

process.”

Dr. Stephens

pointed out that

15 percent of

2001/ 02 Members Council delegates are from

outside the United States. “ The events of

September 11 made some people think twice

about traveling internationally,” said Dr. Stephens.

“ Some of our international delegates told me that

they thought it was particularly important to be

here because this is an important group doing

important work for the world’s libraries.”

Featured speaker Robert A. Simpkins, founder

and president of Global Crosswinds, an interna-tional

advisory and training firm, discussed

“ Global Partnerships and Communications.” Mr.

Simpkins explained that borders are not what

divide people; a lack of understanding of value

systems and cultures causes the greatest difficulty

in communication among people around the

world. He said people cannot be successful build-ing

global partnerships if they make decisions

and judgments based on their own beliefs and val-ues

without considering others.’

“ You cannot adopt another person’s culture,”

said Mr. Simpkins. “ You don’t have that lifetime of

experience that goes into developing those cul-tural

values. But you can adapt to it by learning

about other cultures and gaining a better under-standing

of the values other people hold.

“ If you understand what other people need to

feel successful, then you will significantly

improve your communication and improve your

international alliances,” he continued.

Mr. Simpkins concluded his remarks with a

plea to OCLC Members Council to “ keep helping

the diverse and wonderful people of this world

cut through the information to get the knowledge

they require to make wise choices.”

“ We at OCLC join the people of the world in

offering condolences to those affected by the ter-rorist

attacks of September 11,” said Jay Jordan,

OCLC president and CEO, in his OCLC President’s

Report. “ Like you in your libraries and institu-tions,

we must keep doing our jobs while trying

to comprehend and cope.

“ Our library network links over 40,000 institu-tions

in 76 countries, and together we serve mil-lions

of people,” Mr. Jordan continued. ��� Our global

cooperative has been built on trust and coopera-tion

and the shared belief in the importance of

organizing and preserving the world��s information

and passing it on to future generations. Surely,

M E M B E R S H I P N E W S

4 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

OCLC Members Council welcomes new delegates,

discusses partnerships in building the worldwide

library cooperative

“ Type of Library” and “ Interest Group” sessions allow Members Council

delegates to focus on issues important in their libraries and specialities.

M E M B E R S H I P N E W S

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 5

those beliefs will help to sustain us as we both

remember and move forward.”

Mr. Jordan updated delegates on OCLC activi-ties

and services, including initiatives from the

new OCLC Digital and Preservation Services

group. “ Under the leadership of Meg Bellinger,

president of OCLC Preservation Resources, this

group is launching three major initiatives to help

you bridge the digital divide and transform your

library’s resources into digital collections,” said Mr.

Jordan. “ In short, OCLC is providing a complete,

integrated solution for managing digital content.”

Phyllis B. Spies, vice president, OCLC

Worldwide Library Services, spoke about OCLC’s

commitment to removing barriers to international

resource sharing. Ms. Spies described OCLC

initiatives to bring library collections to the web;

move WorldCat to a Unicode- compliant platform;

implement gateways to major international union

catalogs; and continue to build community among

libraries around the world thereby increasing the

success of global resource sharing.

“ Resource sharing in the broadest sense is con-cerned

with building an infrastructure that

enables end users to locate and obtain materials

of interest in both print and digital formats,” said

Ms. Spies. “ Significant challenges to international

resource sharing exist today. It will take a con-certed

effort by many organizations around the

world to eliminate these barriers. OCLC is deeply

committed to helping to realize this dream.”

Extending WorldCat is a major part of OCLC’s

plan to increase membership and participation.

Lynn Kellar, director, OCLC Enterprise Database

Technology, briefed delegates on progress in

extending WorldCat to a new technological plat-form—

Oracle database technology— that will sup-port

Unicode, facilitate linking to international

repositories and make it possible to provide text,

graphics, sound and motion in the database.

“ Strengthening WorldCat strengthens the coop-erative,”

said Pat Stevens, director, OCLC Product

Management, who spoke about extending the

OCLC cooperative. “ Extending WorldCat has pro-found

positive implications for collaboration

worldwide.”

Members Council continued discussions on

OCLC membership and values. Mary- Alice Lynch,

executive director, Nylink, and chair of the board-appointed

Ad Hoc Committee on Membership,

sought input and suggestions from delegates on

drafting new definitions of membership and con-tribution,

and recommendations for a new for-mula

for allocating delegates to the Members

Council. Bob Seal, university librarian, Mary

Couts Burnett Library, Texas Christian University,

and chair of the Members Council Committee on

Principles of Membership, led a discussion of

membership issues facing the council. Delegates

will continue discussions on membership issues

through the 2001/ 02 term.

Delegates met in “ type- of- library” discussion

groups including Community College and

Academic Libraries; Consortia; Federal, State and

Special Libraries; Large Research Libraries; Private

Academic Libraries; Public Libraries; and State

Academic Libraries. These groups came together

to discuss library environments and services that

might be needed in the next three to five years.

“ This was added to our agenda to help us identify

areas of interest for the future,” said Dr. Stephens.

“ It’s part of our effort to move Members Council

more upstream in the strategic decision- making

process.”

Delegates also met in interest group discussions

focusing on Collections and Technical Services,

Cooperative Reference, Member Services and

Global Librarianship, Preservation/ Electronic

Collections, Research, and Resource Sharing.

George Needham, vice president, OCLC

Member Services, led discussion in a Members’

Forum to conclude the meeting.

The next regularly scheduled Members Council

meeting is Feb. 10– 12, 2002.

Minutes from the October 2001 meeting are

available on the OCLC Members Council web site

< http:// www. oclc. org/ oclc/ uc/>.

The Members Council supports OCLC’s mis-sion

by serving as a key discussion forum and

communications link between member libraries,

regional networks and other partners, and OCLC

management. By providing a channel for recom-mendations

and questions from Members Council

delegates, approving changes in the Code of

Regulations, and electing six members of the

Board of Trustees, Members Council helps shape

the future direction of OCLC.

• • •

M E M B E R S H I P N E W S

6 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale entered

the 48 millionth bibliographic record into

WorldCat ( the OCLC Online Union Catalog) on

Sept. 20.

The record, for a dissertation titled,

“ Maintaining Purity: a Critical Ethnography on

the Performativity of Whiteness in an

Introductory Performance Studies Course,” by

John T. Warren, is the third gold record cataloged

at the university’s Delyte W. Morris Library.

Jim Chervinko, head of Original Cataloging,

said he used the OCLC Cataloging Micro

Enhancer ( CatME) for Windows software to cata-log

the 48 millionth record. CatME for Windows

combines interactive and batch cataloging in one

user- friendly interface.

Mr. Chervinko said he could not have done it

without the help of his colleagues, Karin

McClure, a video cataloger, and Daren Callahan,

head of Cataloging. That team effort resulted in

achieving the 48 millionth record.

��� A good strategy is to be aware of the numbers

and be in the right place at the right time when a

millionth record is approaching,” Mr. Chervinko

said. “ Patience is another strategy, because you

can’t put the records in too quickly.”

Mr. Chervinko printed the record and showed

it to everyone on his floor, including Keith

VanCleave, who hit the 30 millionth record in

WorldCat on March 22, 1994. On Dec. 16, 1981,

the university logged the 8 millionth biblio-graphic

record.

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

( OCLC symbol SOI) is located about 100 miles

southeast of St. Louis, Missouri, in the extreme

southern part of Illinois. The university has an

enrollment of 23,000. The Delyte W. Morris

Library, which holds approximately 2.6 million

volumes, is a member of ILLINET.

Morris Library is planning to renovate and

add 50,000 square feet to its seven- story building.

Morris Library employs three professional

catalogers and nine library technicians. Two

new special collections to be cataloged

include approximately 3,000 items from the

recently acquired Spanish Civil War collection

and the archives from the Open Court Publishing

Company.

• • •

Team effort results in 48 millionth WorldCat record

for Southern Illinois University

The Cataloging Department at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale entered the 48 millionth bibliographic record into

WorldCat on Sept. 20. Members of the staff include: ( back row, left to right) Jeff Gibbens, Gary Beer, Katia Roberto, Bryan

Fagan, Jim Chervinko ( who entered the record), Vern Cornell, ( front row) Gabriella Unger, Jessica Maes, Daren Callahan,

Karin McClure and Donna Johnson.

photo provided by Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

M E M B E R S H I P N E W S

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 7

The Sacred Heart Major Seminary Library in

Detroit, Michigan, entered the 111 millionth

request on the OCLC Interlibrary Loan ( ILL)

service on Sept. 20.

The request was for a book, Divine Meaning:

Studies in Patristic Hermeneutics, by Thomas

Forsyth Torrance. The request was filled the next

day by Cornerstone University Library ( OCLC

symbol: EXB), in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

“ I had no idea we were coming up on a mil-lionth

request,” said Norma Forbes, Interlibrary

Loan coordinator at the library. “ I was very sur-prised

when OCLC called to let me know it was

the 111 millionth.”

Named in honor of a former archbishop of

Detroit, the Edmund Cardinal Szoka Library ( ESJ)

is the graduate and undergraduate library for

Sacred Heart Major Seminary. SHMS is a Roman

Catholic seminary that prepares candidates for

the Roman Catholic priesthood and prepares men

and women for the deaconate, lay ministry and

other leadership roles. Located in the heart of

Detroit, the Cardinal Szoka Library is designed

specifically to meet the needs of the SHMS cur-riculum.

The Library also serves an extended

community of clergy, parishes, staff from the

Archdiocese of Detroit and religious scholars

throughout Michigan and beyond via a paid

membership service.

The library collections at Sacred

Heart Major Seminary have a long

and rich history. The original col-lection

began in 1921 with the

building of SHMS. In 1988, St.

John’s Provisional Seminary was

closed, and the graduate theology

program and library were moved

to Sacred Heart. With both a col-lege

and a graduate program, the

seminary was granted university

status and became a “ Major” semi-nary.

The graduate library was

moved into a space that was reno-vated

and specifically designed for

this use.

The Edmund Cardinal Szoka

Library holdings include 110,000

books, more than 17,600 bound

periodicals, 500 journal subscrip-tions,

and audio and video cassette

collections, making it the largest

theological collection in the state of

Michigan.

The University of Texas

Southwestern Medical Center at

Dallas Library entered the 110 mil-lionth

OCLC ILL request on Aug. 6.

• • •

Sacred Heart Major Seminary makes

111 millionth OCLC ILL request

Catherine De Rosa has been named vice presi-dent,

Corporate Marketing, by Jay Jordan, pres-ident

and chief executive officer, OCLC. She

began serving in this newly created position

on Nov. 1.

“ Cathy has an outstanding record of turning

ideas into innovative products,” said Mr.

Jordan. “ Her extensive background in technol-ogy

and e- business marketing will serve OCLC

well as we extend our services on a global

basis.”

Most recently, Ms. De Rosa served on the

faculty of the Fisher College of Business, Ohio

State University, where she taught e- business

marketing. From 1994 to 2000, she was vice

president and general manager, Symix Systems,

Columbus, Ohio. ( In 2001, Symix changed its

name to FrontStep.) From 1991 to 1993, she

was project manager, international pricing task

force, National Semiconductor. From 1989 to

1990, she was a senior consultant with Price

Waterhouse, serving technology companies in

Boston, Massachusetts, and San Jose,

California. She also held management posi-tions

at Micro Card Technologies and Texas

Instruments.

Ms. De Rosa received a bachelor���s degree in

accounting from the University of Arizona and

a master’s of business administration degree

from the Harvard Business School.

• • •

OCLC Marketing vice president named

Catherine De Rosa

On Sept. 20 ( the same day that Southern Illinois

University entered the 48 millionth bibliographic

record into WorldCat), Norma Forbes ( right) of

the Edmund Cardinal Szoka Library at Sacred

Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Michigan,

entered the 111 millionth request on the OCLC

Interlibrary Loan service. It was at least the

second time that both millionth marks fell on the

same day. Ms. Forbes is pictured with Jo

Garcia, senior clerk, at the library.

photo provided by Sacred Heart Major Seminary

photo provided by Catherine De Rosa

M E M B E R S H I P N E W S

8 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

Subject to the approval of the bankruptcy court,

OCLC has made an offer to purchase substantially

all the assets of netLibrary and assume certain

netLibrary liabilities. netLibrary is a leading

provider of eBooks, eTextbooks and Internet-based

content/ collection management services.

Concurrently, netLibrary announced that it has

voluntarily filed a petition with the

U. S. Bankruptcy Court for the

District of Colorado for relief

under Chapter 11 of the U. S.

Bankruptcy Code. The transac-tion

includes a loan from

OCLC, to be repaid upon the

consummation of the asset sale, to

fund netLibrary’s on- going operations through the

transition period. OCLC’s purchase of

netLibrary’s assets and its operating- funds loan to

netLibrary are both subject to approval of the

bankruptcy court.

“ Electronic books and other forms of elec-tronic

content are quickly becoming strategic dri-vers

in the sharing and advancement of

knowledge in the digital age,” said Jay Jordan,

president and CEO, OCLC. “ This potential alliance

with netLibrary would advance our strategic

directive to deliver technologies and services that

support, extend and enhance the OCLC member-ship

cooperative. eBooks complement our grow-ing

e- journal collection and provide exciting new

synergies for our cataloging, resource sharing, ref-erence

and digital preservation services.”

“ Across the OCLC cooperative, there is strong

interest in OCLC’s pursuing an alliance that would

continue to make netLibrary’s eBook collection

available,” said William J. Crowe, chair, OCLC

Board of Trustees. “ Indeed, 14 of OCLC’s 16 U. S.

regional network affiliates have arrangements for

libraries in their regions to purchase netLibrary

resources. The OCLC Board of Trustees has

expressed its strong support for pursuing this

proposed alliance with netLibrary.”

“ OCLC represents an excellent opportunity for

netLibrary patrons, customers and content part-ners

to continue to deliver the benefits of eBooks

and electronic media to an expanding market.

OCLC and netLibrary share a common commit-ment

to grow and strengthen the role of libraries

and educators in the digital age,” said Rob

Kaufman, president and CEO of netLibrary.

“ We are proud of netLibrary’s role in pioneering

the eBook and eTextbook markets. A potential

alliance with OCLC would extend the opportu-nity

to reach more patrons, grow catalog content

and provide new and innovative learning oppor-tunities

in libraries, classrooms, homes and offices

around the globe.”

netLibrary develops and markets eBooks and

MetaText digital textbooks. eBooks are full-text

electronic versions of

published books that library

patrons can search, borrow,

read, and return via the

Internet. With netLibrary

eBooks, users can access library resources any-where,

anytime, and perform full- text searches

across hundreds of books or within a specific

book to speed research and reference projects.

eBooks can be viewed online from any location

using an Internet browser. netLibrary’s catalog

now contains approximately 40,000 titles

covering a wide range of subject areas such

as business, economics, technology, the social

sciences and more.

netLibrary also markets MetaText digital text-books,

interactive, web- based textbooks with

enhanced teaching, collaborating and learning

tools for teachers and students. MetaText works

with the leading textbook publishers to transform

print textbooks into course- centric digital text-book

learning environments. The MetaText cata-log

of digital textbooks, which includes more

than 160 titles, covers topical areas ranging from

Anthropology to Zoology.

netLibrary < http:// www. netLibrary. com/> is

the leading provider of eBooks and Internet- based

content management services for the institutional

library market. netLibrary develops, archives,

hosts, and maintains eBook collections for acade-mic,

corporate, public, and school libraries.

Thousands of libraries throughout the United

States and internationally are currently providing

netLibrary eBooks to their patrons. The MetaText

Division < http:// www. MetaText. com/> of

netLibrary creates, hosts and manages web- based

digital textbooks for leading textbook publishers.

MetaText digital textbooks provide instructors

and students with a full range of interactive teach-ing,

collaborating and learning tools.

• • •

OCLC makes offer to purchase assets of netLibrary

M E M B E R S H I P N E W S

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 9

by Hans- Jörg Lieder

A number of well- known European libraries,

archives, research and documentation centers

have recently combined their resources and

expertise in the Linking and Exploring Authority

Files project ( LEAF). LEAF has set out to find solu-tions

for some of the problems involved in pro-viding

a common service for the discovery,

annotation and exchange of authority records

( persons and corporate bodies) on an interna-tional

level.

The benefits of the use of authority records

have been widely acknowledged. Linked to the

name in a resource record, the authority record

offers a separately maintained definitive and rich

description of the entity represented by the

name. Widespread access to authority records

will reduce the costs of cataloging work in

libraries and archives, as well as the costs for bio-graphical

research undertaken in various scien-tific

projects. The use of authority records also

ensures that the representation of the objects in

question is one of high quality.

In Europe, however, online access to ( national)

data pools of authority records is, by and large,

limited to huge institutions. Smaller libraries and

archives in general are cut off from this service.

Public users— such as scholars searching for man-uscripts—

so far have no access at all to this infor-mation,

even though their search and retrieval

strategies could greatly benefit from it.

LEAF aims at changing this unsatisfactory situa-tion

by developing a model architecture for a dis-tributed

search system that will harvest existing

name authority records in various European coun-tries.

The retrieved information will not only be

presented to the user of the system but also

partly be saved and stored in a pan- European

“ Common Name Authority File.” Here, differing

forms of name authority records relating to the

same individual or corporate body are linked

together enabling more comprehensive and accu-rate

searches by external users and greater oppor-tunities

for further refinement of records by

professional users. Results will include both a

common core of all available authority data plus

the information where this data was harvested.

The ultimate vision is that a user will be able to

ask: What items connected to a specific person

or corporate body exist in European archives,

libraries and museums?

The feasibility of the LEAF model architecture

will be demonstrated by integrating the project

results into the services of the Manuscripts And

Letters Via Integrated Networks in Europe

( MALVINE) network that allows searches for infor-mation

about modern manuscript holdings in a

number of major European organizations

< http:// www. malvine. org/>. Placed in this spe-cific

context, additional benefits of all involved

parties having access to the Common Name

Authority File will become apparent. Small orga-nizations

without electronic data may indicate

that manuscripts relevant to a particular data

In December 2000, a conference was held at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin in

Germany to discuss two projects funded by the European Commission.

The projects promote the ability for many European libraries to share their

collections and expertise. Following the conference, OCLC became an observing

partner for the LEAF project.

MALVINE and LEAF projects promote library sharing

in Europe

M E M B E R S H I P N E W S

10 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

record in the Common Name Authority File are to

be found in their holdings. A scholarly user may

add corrections and/ or additions to a particular

record via a web interface and thus improve its

quality and richness. Commercial agents— such

as manuscript dealers— may add customized

offers to specific records.

Universal access of this kind to authority

records will, of course, necessitate a human ele-ment

checking the provided information. Since

only actual user queries will gener-ate

a data record in the Common

Name Authority File, the amount of

incoming information requiring edi-torial

work is expected to be man-ageable.

The LEAF consortium acknowl-edges

that many current projects

work in the area of authority

records and therefore has set up a

network of “ observing partners,”

who, though not formally part of

the project, have access to most

documentation and can voice their

views as appropriate. In the USA,

OCLC, the Library of Congress, the

Research Libraries Group and the

Computer Interchange of Museum

Information consortium act as

observing partners. In Europe num-bers

are larger and include a variety

of organizations that differ in size,

scope and purpose. It is to be hoped that this

network of observing partners will ensure high

standards of quality in LEAF’s work, and that

duplication of effort will be avoided where

possible.

LEAF started in March 2001 and will run

for three years < http:// www. leaf- eu. org/>.

— Hans- Jörg Lieder is project manager of

the MALVINE and LEAF projects.

• • •

The Association of Research Libraries and the

OCLC Institute will sponsor a forum for library

directors Feb. 15– 17, at the Golden Nugget Hotel,

Las Vegas, Nevada.

“ Future Library Architecture: Conception,

Design and Use of Library Space,” this year’s

ARL/ OCLC Strategic Issues Forum, will be an aca-demic

library community discussion of the future

of library space and facilities development.

Digital technologies, economic pressures and user

expectations affect development of new library

space along many dimensions: user space, collec-tion

space, service space, activity space, intellec-tual

space and virtual space.

Topics of the forum include the importance

and role of various “ spaces” in a knowledge soci-ety,

the changing nature of knowledge resources

and its impact on collection management and

storage space, creating physical and virtual spaces

that support changing user demands and behav-iors,

creating or repurposing space when library

services or activities change and redefining the

library’s place as the center of the academy.

The Strategic Issues Forum provides thought-provoking

presentations by colleagues and profes-sional

leaders matched with audience discussion

and debate. Its goals are to engage library leaders

in an exploration of important issues affecting the

future development of library space and to help

prepare library directors to envision and make

the case for innovative library spaces that are

directly responsive to user needs and interests.

• • •

Third ARL/ OCLC Strategic Issues Forum scheduled

for February

M E M B E R S H I P N E W S

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 11

To help libraries better serve their increasingly

diverse user populations, OCLC has expanded its

non- English language collection development

product. OCLC Language Sets now comprise

OCLC AsiaLink Sets, OCLC Russian Sets and the

new OCLC Spanish Sets.

OCLC Language Sets offer selection, acquisi-tion,

cataloging and physical processing of books

and videos in an “ all- in- one” package. Currently,

preselected sets for children and adults are avail-able

in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese,

Russian and Spanish.

Each set is selected by collections and lan-guage

experts at OCLC and consists of a mix of

high- quality fiction and nonfiction materials.

Selectors take great care to compose sets for

adults that appeal to a variety of interests; all titles

are bestsellers or award- winners— making these

collections suitable for public and academic

libraries. The children’s sets include a range of

reading levels from preschool to teen.

Introducing Spanish Sets

Responding to the increasing need for Spanish

language materials, OCLC introduced Spanish Sets

in September. Both books and videos are in Latin

American Spanish. Libraries can be assured that

no titles will overlap with their current holdings

because OCLC selectors work from advance

notices of prepublication information. At pre-sent,

four sets are available:

• Books for Adults ( 20 titles per set)

• Books for Children ( 10 titles per set)

• Videos for Teens/ Adults ( 5 titles per set)

• Videos for Children ( 3 titles per set)

A new Spanish set in each category will be

available every other month. Sets will not dupli-cate

titles and each set will “ retire” upon ship-ment.

To offer greater flexibility, libraries may

order a small number of sets or create a standing

order. Sets will be shipped in November, January,

March, May, July and September.

The cost of the set includes: selection, acquisi-tion,

full MARC cataloging and Spanish ( Bilindex)

subject headings. Shipping is free. Physical pro-cessing

is available for an additional charge.

AsiaLink and Russian Sets

AsiaLink continues to offer annual sets of 25, 50

or 100 preselected titles in Chinese, Korean and

Vietnamese; Japanese sets contain 20, 40 or 80

titles. Title lists are updated annually. AsiaLink

Update Sets let libraries add an additional 25 or

50 titles on a quarterly or semi- annual basis.

Japanese update sets contain 20 or 40 titles. Titles

in the update sets do not overlap with the annual

sets, giving libraries a means to speed up their

collection building.

The Russian Sets will follow the AsiaLink pat-tern:

annual sets of 25, 50 or 100 preselected

titles for adult and juvenile readers. Update Sets

are also available.

More information about the OCLC Language

Sets is available on the web < http:// www. oclc. org/

languagesets/ index. shtm>.

• • •

OCLC Language Sets expanded

M E M B E R S H I P N E W S

12 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

OCLC is hosting a number of meetings at the

American Library Association Conference in New

Orleans, Louisiana.

A preconference work-shop,

sponsored by OCLC

Digital & Preservation Services,

titled “ All the News That’s Fit to

Scan: Increasing Access to

Historic Newspapers,” will be

held 8 a. m.– 12: 30 p. m. Friday,

Jan. 18.

The OCLC Symposium,“ Re-conceptualizing

Cataloging,” is

scheduled for Friday from

1: 30– 4: 30 p. m. Four guest

speakers will discuss the

expanding roles of and

demands on information man-agement

communities.

The traditional OCLC Update Breakfast is

scheduled from 7– 9 a. m. Sunday, Jan. 20. A new

tote bag will be presented to attendees.

On Saturday, Jan. 19, OCLC will host these

sessions:

• 7 a. m.— Dewey Update Breakfast

• 9 a. m.— Planning for Life without Passport: An

Overview of the New OCLC Cataloging Service

and Metadata Interface

• 10 a. m.— OCLC Digital and Preservation

Resources Services: An Overview

• 10 a. m.— Cooperative Reference: How It Can

Work for You!

• 1 p. m.— Distance Learning Up Close:

Considerations for Decision Makers

• 1: 30 p. m.— OCLC SiteSearch Suite Open Forum

• 4: 30 p. m.— OCLC Enhance Sharing Session

On Sunday, Jan. 20, OCLC will

host the following sessions:

• 7 a. m.— Update Breakfast

• 10 a. m.— OCLC Digital and

Preservation Resources

Services: An Overview

( a repeat of the Saturday

session)

• 10 a. m.— The Cataloger, the

Public Services Librarian and

Metadata: Can this marriage

be saved?

• 1 p. m.— OCLC FirstSearch and

WorldCat: Making It Better!

The following OCLC User Group sessions will

also be held:

• 4: 30 p. m. Saturday, Jan. 19— OCLC ILL

• 4: 30 p. m. Sunday, Jan. 20— OCLC ILLiad

• 9: 30 a. m. Monday, Jan. 21— OCLC CORC

• 10 a. m. Monday, Jan. 21— OCLC Union List

service

Before the conference, please visit < http://

www. oclc. org/ events/ ala> to register and find

specific meeting sites and presentation speakers.

• • •

OCLC meetings at ALA Midwinter 2002

Page 5 of the September/ October OCLC

Newsletter contained an error. According to

Mary Jackson, senior program officer for

Access Services, Association of Research

Libraries, the last paragraph should have

stated:

Waseda University participates in the

AAU/ ARL/ NCC Japan Journal Access Project

through WorldCat using the OCLC Interlibrary

Loan service. Waseda University functions as a

resource sharing service center in Japan,

making its scholarly Japanese collection avail-able

worldwide in support of Japanese studies.

The American Association of Universities ( AAU),

the Association of Research Libraries ( ARL)

and the North American Coordinating Council

on Japanese Library Resources ( NCC) sponsor

the AAU/ ARL/ NCC Japan Journal Access Project.

Waseda University has cataloged new library

acquisitions on WorldCat since 1985.

We regret the error.

• • •

Correction

M E M B E R S H I P N E W S

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 13

The OCLC Institute will host two seminars

at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in New

Orleans.

On Thursday, Jan. 17, the OCLC

Institute will present “ Knowledge Access

Management: Tools and Concepts for

Next- Generation Catalogers,” a one- day

preconference seminar hosted by Loyola

University. This shortened version

( 9 a. m.– 4 p. m.) of the OCLC Institute’s

popular 2– 1/ 2 day seminar discusses

trends, standards and practices that are

defining knowledge access management

in modern librarianship. The course is

designed not to teach cataloging but to

encourage participants to think about cat-aloging

in new ways. Using MARC/ AACR2

cataloging as a departure point, the course

explores alternative methods such as metadata

and the Resource Description Framework. It is

intended for catalogers and resource managers of

all types who want a focused update on this

rapidly changing dimension of the profession.

On Saturday, Jan. 19, from 1– 3 p. m., the OCLC

Institute will host “ Distance Learning Up Close:

Considerations for Decision Makers.”

This no- cost, two- hour session is

designed for both consumers and pro-ducers

of distance learning. The course

will review current delivery media and

associated costs, discuss the questions

decision- makers need to ask, and look at

resources for further investigation of dis-tance

learning delivery modalities.

Registration details for both sessions,

including costs for the pre- conference

seminar, are available from the OCLC

Institute web site < http:// www. oclc. org/

institute/>.

Visitors to the OCLC booth during

exhibition hours— Saturday through

Monday, Jan. 19– 21— can discuss personal or

organizational development goals with OCLC

Institute staff, including Erik Jul, executive direc-tor,

and Linda Evers, associate director. Guests

will receive a complementary Professional

Development Plan template and learn how the

OCLC Institute can help.

• • •

OCLC Institute to host seminars at ALA Midwinter

The OCLC Institute is presenting a series of three

satellite videoconferences to help librarians incor-porate

emerging knowledge- sharing standards.

Each of the videoconferences will bring

together an industry- recognized standards expert

and two practitioners with real- world issues. The

audience will have the opportunity to interact

with the experts, and the host will facilitate dis-cussion

and debate among participants.

Called “ Steering by Standards,” the videoconfer-ence

series will include:

• “ Sharing Metadata”— March 26; with host

Lorcan Dempsey, vice president, OCLC Office

of Research, and featuring Herbert Van de

Sompel, formerly e- director, British Library

• “ The Open Archives Information System”

— April 19; with host Meg Bellinger, vice presi-dent,

OCLC Digital & Preservation Resources,

and featuring Donald Sawyer, lead, NASA/ Science

Office of Standards and Technology

• “ Metadata Standards: MARC

vs. Dublin Core vs. ONIX”

— May 29; with host Gary Houk,

vice president, OCLC Services, and

featuring Barbara Tillett, director,

Integrated Library System Program

Office, Library of Congress

“ These complex new standards will

significantly impact librarians and other

information professionals, their institutions,

budgets, staffs, systems and workflows,” said Erik

Jul, executive director, OCLC Institute. “ Gaining

practical insights into these global initiatives will

help library leaders decide more quickly and

effectively how to respond locally.”

More details on speakers, dates and times, pric-ing

options, and a downlink license request form

are available on the OCLC Institute web site

< http:// www. oclc. org/ institute/>.

• • •

OCLC Institute to present “ Steering

by Standards” videoconference series

M E M B E R S H I P N E W S

14 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

In May, OCLC Canada moved to new office

space in Chambly, Québec. In addition to

offices for staff, the facility provides a small

conference room for meetings.

“ It is great to now have the sales and ser-vice

staff located in the same office,” said

Daniel Boivin, director, OCLC Canada. “ The

relocation of the staff in one area allows us

to communicate, interact and share more

efficiently various types of information.

In this new space, we are able to offer

improved services to all our users, and we

invite them to come and visit us.”

The number of Canadian libraries using

OCLC services has grown from 50 to 560

since the division’s inception in 1997.

The new office is at 701 Salaberry

Street, Suite 200, Chambly, Québec

J3L 2R1.

• • •

OCLC Canada staff settled in new office

OCLC Canada and the Canadian Library

Association have announced a new award to assist

professional librarians in the 21st century.

The OCLC/ CLA Northern Exposure to

Leadership Institute Award recipient in 2001 is

Tracey Palmer of Kesnick, Ontario. The $ 1,000

award assists librarians in attending the Northern

Exposure to Leadership Institute.

The Northern Exposure to Leadership

Institute’s mission is to “ assist professional

librarians to develop, strengthen and exercise

their leadership skills so that they may be better

equipped to formulate, articulate and achieve

the future changes required by librarians into the

21st century.”

The sixth Northern Exposure to Leadership

Institute will be held in Emerald Lake, British

Columbia, Feb. 7– 12, 2002.

• • •

OCLC Canada and the CLA announce Northern Exposure

to Leadership Institute Award winner

OCLC Statistics

( as of Nov. 1, 2001)

Current statistics are at

< http:// www. oclc. org/ news/

product/ statistics. shtm>.

Participating

libraries

40,830

New member libraries

( Sept. 1– Oct. 31, 2001)

129

Total OCLC Interlibrary Loan

( ILL) service requests

112,209,328

Tracey Palmer

photo provided by OCLC Canada

The OCLC Canada

staff includes

( left to right)

Manon Barbeau,

training and

implementation

specialist; Sylvain

Robichaud, library

services

specialist; and

Daniel Boivin,

director.

photo provided by CLA

M E M B E R S H I P N E W S

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 15

Ingram Library Services and OCLC announced a

new alliance to provide libraries with improved

services via the exchange of bibliographic infor-mation

and metadata for videos several weeks

before their release date.

Under terms of the agreement, professional

catalogers at OCLC will provide full cataloging

records of new release videos supplied by

Ingram. These records will be added to both

WorldCat and Ingram’s cataloging database,

BookMARC.

“ For the past several years, public libraries

have been asking OCLC to increase its video cata-loging

coverage,” said Maureen Finn, executive

director, OCLC Library Resources. “ Librarians can

now order popular videos in either VHS or DVD

format, log onto WorldCat and get the full biblio-graphic

record— even before receipt of the

videos.”

Greg McKinney, director, OCLC Metadata

Contract Services, said that because of the new

agreement with Ingram Library Services, OCLC is

now able to receive new video titles up to 12

weeks ahead of their general release dates. “ This

is a boon for acquisition librarians who request

full bibliographic records for videos,” he said.

�� With Ingram’s help, records for about 90 percent

of popular video titles will be available before

release.”

Ingram sends a screening copy of a video to

OCLC, where it is cataloged in DVD, VHS and, if

applicable, Spanish version formats.

“ This new partnership enables us to quickly

deliver crucial information to our customers,” said

Jim Kelly, president of Ingram Library Services.

“ We also will ensure that the top requested titles

are prioritized by both release date and market

demand so that our customers have the records

they most need at the earliest possible moment.”

“ All libraries with video collections will benefit

from the earlier availability of quality cataloging

data,” said Gary Houk, vice president, OCLC

Metadata Services. “ WorldCat currently contains

over 1 million records for videos. Through this

collaboration with Ingram, we will improve a

library’s video hit rate for current materials, sav-ing

our member libraries both time and money.”

Mr. Kelly agreed: “ Whether libraries take advan-tage

of Ingram processing or rely on their own

technical services staff, the end result is the

same— videos available sooner than ever to meet

user demand. Our goal is to deliver a quicker

turn for shelf- ready video product.”

Headquartered in La Vergne, Tennessee, Ingram

Library Services is a major distributor of books,

music and videos to library markets. Ingram oper-ates

a technical services department that provides

cataloging and physical processing services along

with the materials they sell to library customers.

Ingram Book Group is a leading wholesaler of

trade books, spoken audio and magazines. In addi-tion

to Ingram Library Services, its operating units

include Ingram Book Company, Ingram Periodicals,

Ingram International, Spring Arbor Distributors,

Tennessee Book Company, Ingram Fulfillment

Services and Ingram Customer Systems.

OCLC Metadata Contract Services offers cus-tomized

contract cataloging and physical process-ing

for libraries of all types and sizes, in all

formats and in a wide variety of languages

< http:// www. oclc. org/ oclc/ menu/ techpro. htm>.

• • •

Ingram Library Services and OCLC to provide prerelease

video cataloging information

Highest OCLC

record number

48,265,070

Location listings

( holdings)

822,678,223

FirstSearch libraries

19,246

Jim Kelly

photo provided by Ingram Library Services

The National Library of Australia

( NLA) and OCLC will provide small

libraries in Australia with access to

WorldCat on a trial basis. Australian spe-cial,

school, public and other small

libraries will access WorldCat

through the NLA’s Kinetica

service in 2002.

“ We are delighted to offer access

to OCLC WorldCat through the

Kinetica service,” said Jan

Fullerton, director- general,

National Library of

Australia. “ This will enable

many smaller Australian libraries to have access to

the rich resources of WorldCat for the first time.”

“ We welcome these libraries to the OCLC com-munity,”

said Jay Jordan, OCLC president and chief

executive officer. “ OCLC is pleased to enhance

the local cooperative initiatives of the National

Library of Australia.”

The National Library of Australia operates

Kinetica, Australia’s library network serving over

1,000 Australian libraries of all types. NLA’s

Kinetica provides access to over 33 million items

held in Australian libraries.

• • •

OCLC to collaborate with National Library of Australia

to provide gateway to WorldCat to small libraries

M E M B E R S H I P N E W S

16 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

Catalogers and other library professionals have

entered over 500,000 records describing elec-tronic

resources into WorldCat. On Aug. 29, Linda

Swope, OCLC Metadata Contract Services

Division, entered the 500,000th record on behalf

of OhioLink— a consortium of libraries from 78

Ohio colleges and universities and the State

Library of Ohio. The record describes an elec-tronic

copy of Optical Networks Magazine.

“ WorldCat contains records describing physical

and digital resources,” said Marty Withrow, direc-tor,

OCLC Metadata Services. “ From records for

digital art and historical collections, to oral inter-views

and scientific documents, this valuable

resource is constantly increasing in value for

library staff and library users.”

Library staff and users access records in

WorldCat for reference, interlibrary loan and cata-loging

needs. Libraries may catalog records for dig-ital

resources— items accessed via a URL— using

either the OCLC Cooperative Online Resource

Catalog ( CORC) service or the OCLC Cataloging

service. The records describing these resources

may be viewed using the OCLC FirstSearch service

or any OCLC cataloging interface.

CORC is a web- based, metadata- creation sys-tem

optimized for the creation of bibliographic

records and pathfinders ( subject bibliographies)

for electronic resources— both those held in the

library and those available on the web. OCLC

continues to enhance and develop CORC, with

the goal of introducing a new, browser- based cata-loging

toolset by mid- 2002.

“ OCLC is moving full speed ahead with its ser-vices

in order to meet the challenges of 21st cen-tury

scholarly research activities,” said Jackie Shieh,

president of the CORC Users Group and team

leader, Special Projects & Collections Team, Harlan

Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan.

“ CORC, which began as a research project in 1999,

provides the foundation for the soon- to- be cata-loging

and metadata interface, a leading- edge tool

that will benefit users worldwide.”

CORC is built on the same model as WorldCat.

By helping libraries work together and eliminate

duplicate effort, OCLC helps lower cataloging

costs for all libraries. Now in its 30th year,

WorldCat contains more than 48 million unique

records for books and other resources held by

libraries around the world.

The OCLC Metadata Contract Services offer

customized contract cataloging and physical pro-cessing

for libraries of all types and sizes, in all

formats, and in a wide variety of languages

< http:// www. oclc. org/ oclc/ menu/ techpro. htm>.

The OCLC Cooperative Online Resource

Catalog service offers a toolkit, based on technol-ogy

developed at OCLC, that supports automated

record creation, authority control, URL mainte-nance

and pathfinder creation

< http:// www. oclc. org/ corc/>.

• • •

WorldCat now contains more than 500,000 records

for digital resources

M E M B E R S H I P N E W S

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 17

by George Needham

On Oct. 17, nearly 100 librarians, trustees, ven-dors,

OCLC staff and others gathered in OCLC’s

Kilgour Atrium for “ Ohio Dinners for Spectrum.”

The event raised $ 5,800 for the American Library

Association’s Spectrum Scholarship Initiative.

The Spectrum Initiative’s major drive is to

recruit applicants and award scholarships to

African American, Latino/ Hispanic, Asian/ Pacific

Islander, and Native American/ Alaskan Native stu-dents

for graduate programs in library and infor-mation

studies. The American Library Association

has committed resources for 50 annual scholar-ships

of $ 5,000 a year for the initiative’s first four

years.

The evening featured several highlights. Jay

Jordan welcomed the group and discussed

OCLC’s Inclusion Initiative. Robin Jones of the

Network to Build Better Jobs ( NBBJ) presented

Melvin Kendall, manager, OCLC Corporate

Inclusion, with a plaque for his work in making

computers available to NBBJ’s graduates. Keynote

speaker Khafre K. Abif, the director of the

Langston Hughes Library of the Children’s

Defense Fund, spoke on the role of professional

organizations like OCLC and ALA in making the

profession more inclusive. Mr. Abif had served on

the committee that created the Spectrum

Initiative in 1997.

The dinner was underwritten by OCLC as part

of its Inclusion program, which seeks to increase

diversity within the organization. With OCLC’s

support, all ticket proceeds went directly to the

scholarship program. Co- sponsors for the dinner

were the Academic Library Association of Ohio,

INFOhio, Kent State University School of Library

and Information Science, Ohio Educational

Library Media Association, the Library and

Information Services Program, at Ohio

Dominican College, Ohio Library Council,

OhioLINK, OHIONET, OPLIN and the State

Library of Ohio.— George Needham is vice

president, OCLC Member services.

• • •

“ Ohio Dinners for Spectrum” raises funds,

consciousness for diversity issues

Jay Jordan ( right) greets keynote speaker Khafre Abif at the Ohio

Dinners for Spectrum program.

R E S E A R C H

18 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

In its annual survey of the World Wide Web, the

OCLC Office of Research has determined that the

number of public web sites continues to expand

but at a slower rate, that the distribution of public

web sites over countries and languages has been

stable over the last several years, and that informa-tion

and professional consulting industries oper-ate

the largest proportion of web sites.

“ We may be witnessing the cresting of the first

wave of new web site providers,” said Ed O’Neill,

OCLC consulting research scientist and manager

of the OCLC Web Characterization Project. “ The

recent string of dot- com failures may also be a fac-tor

in the slowdown, as well as the increased use

of virtual hosting technologies, which permit the

clustering of multiple ‘ virtual sites’ at a single

Internet location.”

The Web Characterization Project

< http:// wcp. oclc. org/>, conducted by the OCLC

Office of Research, has collected a random

sample of web sites annually since 1997. A

distinguishing feature of the Web Characterization

Project is that the study is based on a random

sample. Although this methodology is more diffi-cult

to employ than more commonly used

approaches, it allows researchers to make more

unbiased estimates of the size and characteristics

of the web. The OCLC Office of Research is one

of the world’s leading centers devoted exclusively

to the challenges facing libraries in a rapidly

changing information technology environment.

According to statistics compiled for the year

ending June 30, the public web includes more

than 3.1 million sites, a 6 percent increase over

the previous year’s total. A public web site is

defined as a distinct location on the Internet offer-ing

unrestricted public access to content via web

protocols. The rate of growth of the public web

has been slowing over the last few years, a trend

which was especially pronounced over the last 12

months. From 1997 to 2000, the public web

increased by about 700,000 sites each year, but

increased by only 200,000 sites between 2000

and 2001.

Public web sites constitute 36 percent of the

web as a whole; the remainder includes sites that

are duplicates of other public sites, sites that offer

content intended for a restricted audience ( e. g.,

those sites which require prior authorization for

access, or are a web interface to hardware such as

routers or printers), and sites that are “ under con-struction.”

Over the past year, the web as a whole

grew by 18 percent, reaching an estimated total

of nearly 9 million sites. Although more than 1.3

million new sites were added to the web during

this period, growth over the past year is substan-tially

slower than that observed between 1998

and 1999 ( 71 percent) or 1999 and 2000 ( 52 per-cent).

Overall, however, the number of web sites

has increased almost six- fold since OCLC’s first

survey in 1997.

Analysis of public web sites suggests that the

international character of the web— as measured

by the country of origin and languages of public

web site content— has changed little in the last

several years. About half of the sampled public

web sites in 2001 were provided by organizations

or individuals located in the United States, 5 per-cent

by German organizations, and 4 percent

each by Canadian and Japanese organizations.

These results are similar to statistics compiled in

1999. The distribution of languages across web

content has changed very little since 1999: about

75 percent of all public sites in 2001 contained

some content in English; 7 percent in German;

and 5 percent in Japanese.

Analysis of the organizations providing content

on public web sites indicated that the largest pro-portion—

about 16 percent— is associated with

information industries, including Internet service

providers, commercial publishers, software

companies and online information services.

Professional and technical consultants— ranging

from web site and software designers to lawyers

and accountants— comprised the second largest

proportion at 14 percent. Retailers were also

widely represented in the sample at 12 percent.

“ Characterizing the economic activities of web

site providers is a new addition to our survey,” Dr.

O’Neill said.“ This analysis gives a fresh perspec-tive

on the question of ‘ what’s on the web?’”

Adult sites— those containing sexually explicit

material— constitute approximately 2 percent of

the public web, or about 74,000 sites. The pro-portion

of the public web occupied by adult sites

has remained steady since 1998.

• • •

OCLC researchers find slowdown in web growth

Ed O’Neill

R E S E A R C H

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 19

by Robert C. Bolander

The American National

Standards Institute ( ANSI)

has approved the Dublin

Core Metadata Element Set

Z39.85- 2001 ( or “ Dublin

Core”) as a metadata stan-dard

for resource discovery

in a multidisciplinary infor-mation

environment.

This decision adds to the momentum of the

Dublin Core, which is gaining broader support

among governments and business organizations.

“ The approval of Z39.85 formalizes a long

period of consensus- building representing the

efforts of hundreds of people, and all participants

can take pride in what this community has built,”

said Stuart Weibel, executive director, Dublin Core

Metadata Initiative ( DCMI), and consulting

research scientist, OCLC Office of Research.

The Dublin Core proposal was shepherded

through the ANSI standardization process by a

committee of the National Information Standards

Organization ( NISO). John Kunze, University of

California/ National Library of Medicine, chaired

the committee, which included Rebecca

Guenther, Library of Congress; Marjorie Hlava,

Access Innovations; Clifford Morgan , John Wiley

& Sons; and John Perkins , CIMI Consortium.

“ ANSI/ NISO approval is an important step in

progressing Dublin Core toward a formal interna-tional

standard within ISO,” said Mr. Kunze.

Currently six countries ( Australia, Denmark,

Finland, the United Kingdom, Canada and New

Zealand) have adopted Dublin Core for use in

managing discovery of, and access to, their infor-mation

resources. Furthermore, the DCMI

Government Working Group, in collaboration

with the Interchange of Data between

Administrations Programme ( IDA) of the

European Commission, is exploring the possibility

of standardizing the use of metadata across

European governments and parliaments, and

identifying the resources, both technical and non-technical,

that would be required to support this

activity.

In the commercial sector, Adobe Systems has

developed a metadata framework ( XMP) < http://

www. adobe. com/ products/ xmp/ main. html>

that is based on the Dublin Core and other meta-data

schemas. The Adobe approach uses the

Resource Description Framework ( RDF)

< http:// www. w3. org/ rdf/> of the World Wide

Web Consortium ( W3C) to support an extensible

metadata framework that includes the cross- disci-plinary

benefits of Dublin Core with extensions

to support a particular domain or discipline.

This metadata support currently is available in

three Adobe products, including Adobe Acrobat

5.0, the leading page- description language in use

on the web. As XMP is introduced to other prod-ucts

in the Adobe line, it will become practical to

create and manage interoperable metadata from a

variety of media types common to the web.

Metadata

Metadata is structured information that describes,

explains, locates or otherwise makes it easier to

retrieve, use or manage an information resource.

The Dublin Core originally was developed to be

simple and concise, and to describe web- based

documents. The current standard defines 15

metadata elements for resource description in a

cross- disciplinary information environment.

These elements are: title, subject, description,

source, language, relation, coverage, creator, pub-lisher,

contributor, rights, date, type, format and

identifier.

Providing machine- understandable data on the

web has become a priority not just for publishers

and scientific communities, but for a wide range

of commercial ventures and services. Resource

discovery across a diversity of services on the

emerging Semantic web < http:// www. w3. org/

2001/ sw/> is facilitated by the use of shared

metadata vocabularies such as the Dublin Core

Metadata Element Set.

History of Dublin Core

Dublin Core and DCMI, the organization that

coordinates its development, began in 1995 with

an invitational workshop in Dublin, Ohio, that

brought together librarians, digital library

researchers, content providers and text- markup

experts to improve discovery standards for infor-mation

resources. The original Dublin Core

emerged as a small set of descriptors that quickly

drew global interest from a wide variety of infor-mation

providers in the arts, sciences, education,

business and government sectors.

Dublin Core Metadata Element Set approved

as ANSI Standard Z39.85- 2001

R E S E A R C H

20 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

The initial workshop spawned a series of meet-ings

that has supported international, cross-disciplinary

metadata development. DC- 2001, the

ninth meeting in this series, was held Oct. 22– 26,

in Tokyo, Japan. Cosponsored by the National

Institute for Informatics < http:// www. nii. ac. jp/>

( Japan), the DCMI, and Japan Science and

Technology Corporation < http:// www. jst. go. jp/

EN/>, this meeting was the first event in the DC

Workshop series to be hosted in Asia, and also

was the first event to include conference and

tutorial tracks in addition to the workshop.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

DCMI < http:// www. dublincore. org/> is an orga-nization

dedicated to promoting the widespread

adoption of interoperable metadata standards and

developing specialized metadata vocabularies for

describing resources that enable more intelligent

information- discovery systems. It provides an

open forum for the development of standards and

vocabularies across a broad range of purposes

and business models. Its activities include con-sensus-

driven working groups, global workshops,

conferences, standards liaison and educational

efforts to promote widespread acceptance of

metadata standards and practices. DCMI will act

as the maintenance agency for the Dublin Core

Metadata Element Set standard.

The American National Standards Institute

ANSI < http:// www. ansi. org/> is a private, non-profit

organization that administers and coordi-nates

the U. S. voluntary standardization and

conformity assessment system. Founded in 1918,

the institute’s mission is to enhance both the

global competitiveness of U. S. business and the

U. S. quality of life by promoting and facilitating

voluntary consensus standards and conformity

assessment systems, and safeguarding their

integrity.

National Information Standards Organization

NISO < http:// www. niso. org/>, a nonprofit associ-ation,

is the only U. S. group accredited by ANSI to

develop and promote technical standards used in

a wide variety of information services. NISO’s

voting members and other supporters include a

broad base of information producers and users

including libraries, publishers, government agen-cies

and information- based businesses. All NISO

standards are developed by consensus under the

guidance of experts and practitioners in the field

to meet the needs of both the information user

and the producer.— Robert C. Bolander is man-ager,

Communications and Programs, OCLC Office

of Research.

• • •

R E S E A R C H

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 21

by Shirley Hyatt

Kathleen Braverman spoke

at OCLC on Aug. 28, as part

of the Office of Research-sponsored

Distinguished

Seminar Series. Dr.

Braverman is a consultant

for Global Lead Manage-ment

Corporation, a con-sulting

firm specializing in

diversity and inclusion

issues in the workplace. Her presentation, titled

“ Social Dialects in America’s Workplace,” exam-ined

the array of communication challenges pre-sented

by differences in speech styles and

linguistic behaviors. Her goal was to improve the

chances for successful communication by increas-ing

the audience members’ awareness of their

reactions to people who sound different from

them and whose culturally based communications

behaviors they are likely to misinterpret.

Dr. Braverman began her lecture by presenting

some fundamentals of social linguistics. A social

dialect is a variety of a language, developed

though a complex interplay of historical, social,

political, educational, economic and linguistic fac-tors.

A standard dialect is one spoken by politi-cally,

socially, economically and educationally

powerful and prestigious people. In the United

States, this is typically the “ General American

Dialect” or “ Educated Eastern Dialect”; both

dialects are commonly spoken by television

broadcasters or on PBS radio. Race, ethnicity,

social class, education, occupation, region, gen-der,

context, peer group identification and first

language community all impact the type of lan-guage

and communicative behavior acquired by

an individual. Most of us perceive our own lin-guistic

habits as “ right” and speech patterns that

differ from ours as “ wrong” because they are non-standard

relative to our own accustomed speech

environment, but it is important to understand

that there is no “ correct” dialect.

As Dr. Braverman pointed out through numer-ous

examples, culture influences members’ rules

of contact and thus has a major impact on com-munication—

both what is communicated and

how it is communicated. The “ how” of language

— voice quality, pitch, loudness, articulation, flu-ency,

speech rate, pronunciation, rhythm and

also body movement and use of space— is more

important than the “ what” of communications,

and varies widely by nationality, ethnic back-ground

and gender. Though acceptable within

their native culture, such differences may be jar-ring

to an unacquainted ear. Dr. Braverman asked

the audience to consider their personal reactions

to her examples:

• Semantics: “ For the past six months at work, I

have reported to a ___________” ( woman, gal,

girl, female, ... ) The word choice here reveals

much about the speaker’s attitude or state of

mind, and that choice may well determine the

listener’s reaction to it.

• Phonology: The vowel sounds in “ out,”

“ tough,” and “ although” are quite subtle

differences for nonnative English speakers to

discern. When non- native speakers make

phonological errors, native speakers frequently

judge their competency and even intelligence

to be inferior. Dr. Braverman noted that her

clients have told her that people in the

Midwest generally are less tolerant of other

dialects than are people on either coast.

• Syntax: �� Don’t nobody want none.” Though

non- standard, this sentence is acceptable

within many speech communities.

• Pragmatics: Who can say what to whom and

under what circumstances varies widely. In

some cultures, it is acceptable to show

emotion because it is honest and reflects a

willingness to work out differences; in others,

it is not. Cultures may also have implicit

hierarchy rules governing what subordinates

may say to their superiors. In exchanges

involving both styles, the worker who speaks

up to defend herself may be labeled as overly

aggressive.

• Speech rate and fluency: The numbers of

words per minute varies among social dialects.

Speakers from the Eastern United States tend

to use a faster rate of speaking than do

Midwesterners and Southerners, whose rate of

speech is slower yet than Midwesterners.

People who speak rapidly may judge people

who speak more slowly as less intelligent;

conversely, speakers of more laid- back social

Kathleen Braverman discusses the impact

of linguistic dialects on the workplace

Shirley Hyatt

R E S E A R C H

22 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

dialects tend to judge some speakers of

Eastern social dialects as aggressive or

obnoxious.

For each aspect of language difference, and for

every example, we can probably summon per-sonal

examples and occasions when we may have

fallen short of communicative “ egalitarianism.”

Many individuals have developed “ communica-tive

competence” in several different social

dialects and are able to “ code switch” into the sit-uationally

appropriate dialect more or less auto-matically.

They are able to modify their own

speech patterns adeptly according to the context

in which they are communicating. Though Dr.

Braverman emphasized that there is no “ right”

style of communication, having a larger repertoire

of communication competencies increases one’s

flexibility and probability of success.

Doesn’t it seem truly amazing that any of us

ever succeed in communicating precisely our

intended message to a listener in any situation? It

is particularly surprising in work situations where

people from diverse backgrounds increasingly

may be found working side by side, or in virtual

space. Standard English Dialect is the social

dialect most acceptable in the majority of the

regions of the United States. Most speakers of

other dialects understand easily Standard English,

even if they don’t speak it, because they are used

to listening to newscasters and others in the

media. However, in regions of the country where

other dialects are dominant, the use of the local

dialects is preferred by the native speakers. In

regions of the country where Standard English is

the dominant dialect, acceptance of a speaker of

a different dialect is less certain.

Dr. Braverman discussed gender differences in

communications styles and their impact on com-municative

success. One’s access to power may be

heavily dependent upon one’s ability to consis-tently

make a favorable impression when speaking.

Social linguist Deborah Tannen describes it this

way,“ But what is power? The ability to influence

others, to be listened to, to get your way rather

than having to do what others want. How you

talk creates power, both by gaining influence

within the role you have, ensuring that you are

given the responsibility to make decisions, and

earning promotions to higher levels of institu-tional

power.”

Does this mean that women should simply imi-tate

the communication behavior of men in the

workplace? In general, the answer would be “ No,

it is not that simple.” Does this mean that there

may be times when it is to a woman’s advantage

to adapt her style to be more effective? Yes, it

does. Does this same advice— that they may want

to adapt their natural style, especially when work-ing

with women— apply to men? Yes, it does.

Here are some of the ways in which males and

females often differ in terms of their communica-tions

styles.

• Rapport versus report talk— Women in

business often share personal stories with

other women and expect other women to

respond in kind, to build rapport. Also,

women tend to expect their manager,

especially a female manager, to show an

interest in their personal lives. Men also talk to

build connections. However, the content is

different, as men tend to talk about sports,

politics or details about how a project or

hobby was accomplished.

• Network versus hierarchy— Status and

connection are not mutually interconnected; in

fact, they are intertwined. However, men tend

to focus more on establishing status— Who’s

one up? Who’s one down? Men may be said to

use a sports or military model when working

on a team ( see illustration). Women, however,

tend to talk about building relationships to get

things done, de- emphasizing hierarchical

status. Women tend to get things done by

building networks.

• Approach to problems— When women

share problems, they often are looking for

empathy or to talk through the elements of a

situation to help clarify their thinking as they

process the situation and decide how to deal

with it. Men often interpret this behavior as a

request for help, and they, in attempting to be

helpful, offer solutions to help “ fix” the

problem or advice about how best to address

the situation. Men tend to keep their problems

to themselves as they process what to do,

unless they want another’s advice.

• Approach to conflict— More often than

women, men tend to view conflict as a means

to connect or to bond. Sometimes, they will

play the role of devil’s advocate to enjoy the

challenge of bantering. In contrast, to the

extent that a woman views conflict as a threat

to her connection or relationship with another,

she may avoid addressing the conflict directly.

She may talk about the conflict with a third

party, give in, or simply avoid it and hope that

it goes away on its own.

R E S E A R C H

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 23

• Explicit versus implicit— More women than

men are raised in environments where they are

expected to pay attention to contextual cues to

determine appropriate behavior, and to

respond to the situational need. Since

everyone is privy to the same, shared

information, there is no need for direct

information. Other men and women are used

to environments where there is explicit, direct

communication when there is need for action.

Emphasis is on the content of the verbal

communication rather than the situational

contexts. There is great potential for frus-tration

and miscommunication when there is a

“ miss” in this cultural expectation between a

manager and his/ her direct reports or

co- workers. Dr. Braverman recommended that,

when in doubt, direct communication in the

workplace is usually a more successful strategy

to avoid confusion and disappointment.

• Nonverbal communication— There are

documented differences in the nonverbal

communications of men and women. Women,

for example, smile more than men. What does

it mean when a woman smiles and nods her

heard while someone is talking. Does it mean

agreement? Not necessarily. It simply means

she is listening. Women also have more eye

contact, and they take up less space in

proportion to their body size than men. Men,

on the other hand, initiate touch and interrupt

more often than women.

• Verbal communication— Women are more

likely to begin sentences with qualifiers such

as,“ If you think this might be relevant” or

“ Maybe” or “ I don’t know if this will work,

but ...” Women also finish declarative

sentences with upward vocal inflection more

often than do men. Both of these behaviors

give listeners the impression that the speaker

lacks confidence in what she is saying. On the

other hand, females who exhibit opposite- sex

non- verbal and verbal behaviors are judged

more harshly than females who exhibit gender-appropriate

behaviors. It appears that working

women are in a double bind: they’re judged

negatively if they conform to gender-appropriate

standards of behavior, and they are

judged negatively if they exhibit behavior

more typical of males. ( Both men and women

tend to give these negative judgments.)

Dr. Braverman cautioned the audience that

these statements are only true generally. Many

individuals don’t conform to these generalities;

studies show, for example, that only 75 percent of

women may conform to them.

In closing, Dr. Braverman reiterated her goal to

provide information to help listeners improve

their conscious awareness of their reactions to

people who sound and behave differently, so that

they can begin to develop tools and skills to

bridge gaps in communication effectiveness.

— Shirley Hyatt is marketing and transition man-ager,

OCLC Office of Research.

• • •

Do what the leader says.

Get the job done.

Make personal sacrifices, if necessary.

Give/ get critical feedback to improve

performance.

Limit unnecessary talk.

PYRAMID

MODEL

RULES FOR

TEAM PLAYERS

NETWORK

MODEL

The goal is to put forth your

personal best effort.

RULES FOR TEAM PLAYERS

Winning is the Goal.

Listen and share ideas.

Reach decisions by consensus.

Support your team members.

Give/ get positive feedback to encourage

best performance.

R E S E A R C H

24 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

by Diane Vizine- Goetz

In April of 2000, Joan Mitchell— executive

director, OCLC Forest Press, and editor in chief,

Dewey Decimal classification— and I proposed

a research agenda for classification. We identified

five broad areas in which research and develop-ment

can accelerate the transformation of

existing knowledge- organization schemes into

tools capable of meeting new and emerging

needs:

• Scheme development

• Alternative structures

• Tools and rules for application

• Automatic classification

• New uses of classification systems.

The DDC has been continuously updated and

developed for more than 125 years, and, recently,

vocabulary mapping has been used to enrich the

scheme with new terminology. With each new

electronic tool, the underlying database has been

expanded and improved. We can now generate

versions of the DDC that include many of the

improvements that have resulted from the devel-opment

of the scheme and its transformation into

new application tools, for example, class hierar-chies,

translation information, mapped terminol-ogy,

and additional markup. These enhanced

versions are being used in a range

of projects that are exploring new

uses and applications of Dewey.

This article describes four pro-jects

that use the DDC in new and

innovative ways: Renardus, the

European Union project whose goal

is to provide users with integrated

access to subject gateways and

other Internet- based, distributed

services; the cooperative project

between the Library of Congress

( LC) and OCLC to develop a proto-type

for a new reference service

based on the Collaborative Digital

Reference Service ( CDRS) pilot; and

two OCLC Office of Research

projects that are exploring new

approaches to browsing, navigation and the dis-play

of results sets.

Renardus

Renardus is a collaborative project to develop a

web- based service to enable searching and brows-ing

across a range of European subject gateways.

Renardus is funded by the European Commission

as part of the Information Society Technologies

Programme, part of the European Union’s 5th

Framework Programme. Project partners are

drawn from European library and other informa-tion-

related communities and include national

libraries, research centers and subject gateway

services from Denmark, Finland, Germany, the

Netherlands, Sweden and the U. K. A version of

the DDC, enhanced with complete hierarchies

and mapped vocabulary, is being used to provide

a browsing structure and common switching lan-guage

for the different classification schemes used

by the project partners. The browsing structure

will be offered in English initially and later in

some of the languages of the DDC translations

( e. g., French and German). The project will for-mulate

recommendations for subject access in

gateways and provide guidance on mapping.

Dewey Research: New uses for the DDC

R E S E A R C H

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 25

DDC in the Collaborative Digital Reference

Service ( CDRS)

The Library of Congress and OCLC are cooper-ating

in the development of a prototype to

support a new reference service based on the

CDRS pilot, begun in early 2000 by LC and

16 participating libraries. The goal of CDRS is

to provide professional reference service to

researchers anytime, anywhere, through an inter-national,

digital network of libraries and related

institutions. As a prerequisite to participation,

a candidate member is required to complete a

profile that describes the organization and the

collection it will use to provide reference service

through CDRS. The collection is characterized

by language, geographic coverage, for-mat

and subject area. Currently, the

Library of Congress Classification ( LCC)

is used to describe subject strength. In a

joint effort, Dewey editorial staff mem-bers

and OCLC researchers are working

on mapping LCC and DDC classes.

These mappings will allow libraries

using the DDC to profile themselves by

Dewey and provide a mechanism for

LCC and DDC libraries to interoperate

more easily within the CDRS.

OverView ( Information Visualization

using Dewey)

Can a classification scheme be used to

support browsing and navigation? In

the OverView project in OCLC’s Office

of Research, Lorraine Normore and

Mark Bendig have been looking into ways of sum-marizing

the results of queries against text data-bases,

creating graphical representations

that provide information to the searcher

about the results, and providing a way for

users to navigate in the information

space.

The DDC contains a particularly well-developed

set of hierarchies, an easy to

use notation and a rich set of associated

terminology. These characteristics have

allowed it to be used to define an infor-mation

space for search results. The hier-archical

structure and its systematic

notation provide a mechanism for allowing the

user to see instantly how information is distrib-uted

into conceptual categories defined by the

classification and enables a systematic way to sup-port

navigating from general to specific in the

space. The richly associated terminology enables

the tool to provide information about each loca-tion

in the space on demand. The resulting visual-ization

suggests that new tools that support the

exploration of information spaces can be built to

benefit from generations of work done by classifi-cation

theorists.

R E S E A R C H

26 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

Collaborative Digital Reference Service ( CDRS)

< http:// www. oclc. org/ strategy/ reference/ cdrs/

index. shtm>

Koch, Traugott, Heike Neuroth, and Michael

Day. “ Renardus: Cross- browsing European

subject gateways via a common classification

system ( DDC).” In papers presented at an

IFLA Satellite Meeting sponsored by the IFLA

Section on Classification and Indexing &

IFLA Section on Information Technology,

OCLC Dublin, Ohio, USA, 14– 16 Aug. 2001.

Mitchell, Joan S. and Diane Vizine- Goetz.

“ Millennium Project Research Agenda:

Cataloging and Classification.” Library

Quarterly 70 ( 2) April 2000: ix– xx. An

expanded version is available at:

< http:// www. oclc. org/ dewey/ research/

research_ agenda. htm>

Normore, Lorraine F. and Mark Bendig. Using a

classification- based information space. In:

New Paradigms in Information Visualization

and Manipulation, edited by C. Shaw. To be

published by ACM Press, 2001.

Renardus. < http:// www. renardus. org/>

Vizine- Goetz, Diane and Roger Thompson.

“ Toward DDC- Classified displays of NetFirst

search results.” In papers presented at an

IFLA Satellite Meeting sponsored by the IFLA

Section on Classification and Indexing &

IFLA Section on Information Technology,

OCLC Dublin, Ohio, USA, 14– 16 Aug. 2001.

• • •

Further Reading

NetFirst Results Categorized

by Dewey

In a separate project, Roger

Thompson, consulting systems

analyst, OCLC Office of Research,

and I are exploring how Dewey

can be used to categorize NetFirst

search results. NetFirst, an OCLC

database of electronic resources

available in the FirstSearch service,

is an ideal database for

experimenting with categorized

results sets since all records in the

database contain class numbers

and high- level DDC captions.

Research has shown that

categorized displays enable users

to analyze search results more

quickly than when list- type

displays are used. High- level

characterizations of results sets by

DDC classes can provide context

for the retrieved set, criteria for search

refinement, and a means for accessing Dewey

hierarchies to browse broader and narrower

categories.— Diane Vizine- Goetz is consulting

research scientist, OCLC Office of Research.

• • •

D E W E Y T U R N S 1 2 5

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 27

by Joan S. Mitchell

It is hard to imagine what

Melvil Dewey would think of

the classification system that

bears his name on the 125th

anniversary of the first edi-tion.

The Dewey Decimal

Classification system was

first published in 1876 in

Amherst, Massachusetts, a

sleepy college town in the Western part of the

state. As a student and then a librarian at Amherst

College, Dewey developed the system as an effi-cient

shelf- arrangement device for books. If Dewey

were to look at his system today, he would certainly

recognize the top levels— the basic structure and

the main classes have remained remarkably intact.

What has changed in the system is its expansion in

breadth and depth well beyond the three digits of

the first edition, its hospitality to an ever- growing

diversity of topics, its worldwide adoption, its avail-ability

in many languages, and its use well beyond

that of a simple shelf arrangement tool. Today, the

Dewey Decimal Classification is the most widely

used library classification scheme in the world, and

is employed as a knowledge organization tool for

everything from books to web resources.

Dewey is used by 200,000 libraries in 135

countries. National bibliographies of 60 coun-tries

are organized by the DDC; 17 countries in

Africa, 13 countries in the Americas/ Caribbean

region, eight countries in Europe, seven countries

in the Middle East, and 15 countries in the Asia-

Pacific region use the DDC for this purpose. Just

last year, the National Library of Switzerland

became the 60th national bibliographic agency to

use the DDC to organize its national bibliography.

Over the course of its lifetime, Dewey has been

translated into 30 languages. During the past 12

months, the Italian, Russian and Spanish transla-tions

of DDC 21 have been published, joining the

French translation published in 1998. Arabic and

French abridged editions have been published,

and the Arabic translation of DDC 21 is expected

to be completed at the end of this year. The first

Greek translation of Dewey will be published in

November, and Norwegian and Icelandic transla-tions

are near completion. We are in active discus-sions

with the national libraries of Germany and

Vietnam about the first translations of the DDC

into those languages. In addition, we are explor-ing

web versions of the DDC with our French,

German and Norwegian translation partners.

Another key feature of the DDC is its meaning-ful

notation. Dewey uses familiar Arabic notation

to represent concepts across the classification.

For example, notation 94 represents Australia

throughout the DDC:

One of the great strengths of Dewey is that its

controlled vocabulary, the notation, usually

remains the same in translation. At right are the

Dewey number and caption for computer pro-gramming

in the English, French, Italian, Russian

and Spanish translations of DDC 21. In each edi-tion,

005.1 has the same meaning, but the caption

appears in the language of the translation.

Internet in Australia 004.6780994

Animals of Australia 591.994

History of Australia 994

Dewey Decimal Classification: 125 and still growing

D E W E Y T U R N S 1 2 5

28 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

The continuous development of the DDC over

the last 125 years has resulted in three key features

that distinguish it from many of the new knowl-edge-

organization tools that have appeared on the

web: well- defined categories, well- developed hier-archies,

and a rich network of relationships.

In this example, the hierarchy provides context

to “ fields” as a mathematical concept ( as opposed,

for example, to fields in agriculture or physics).

The record contains notes that further define the

category and relate the category to other con-cepts

in mathematics.

Perhaps the most important feature of the DDC

is that it has been developed and updated continu-ously

for the last 125 years by a team of editors,

and with the ongoing advice of our 10- member

international advisory committee— the Decimal

Classification Editorial Policy Committee ( EPC).

We expect to publish a new print version of the

full edition, DDC 22, in June 2003. Publication of

Abridged Edition 14 will follow in January 2004.

We keep the Classification up to date continuously

through postings on our web site and through reg-ular

releases of our electronic versions.

Every other week, we post new Library of

Congress subject headings accompanied by

Dewey numbers on the Dewey web site. On the

first day of each month, we also post selected

new and changed DDC entries. These services

provide classification advice on topics of interest

in advance of their announcement in the elec-tronic

versions of the DDC.

We use the electronic versions of the DDC as

our chief updating mechanism. Dewey was the

first library classification scheme available in elec-tronic

form, starting with Electronic Dewey in

1993 and then Dewey for Windows in 1996. In

2000, we introduced WebDewey in CORC, a web

version of the DDC. In January 2002, we will

expand the availability of WebDewey to all

libraries. We will also introduce a web version

of the abridged edition early next year.

One of our key strategies in updating and

improving the DDC is vocabulary mapping.

The DDC editors, the OCLC Office of Research

and our outside partners are involved in this

effort. The Dewey editors map selected new

Library of Congress subject headings to Dewey

numbers on a regular basis. The OCLC Office of

Research has developed statistical techniques to

derive subject heading mappings to Dewey num-bers

from WorldCat. The new abridged web ver-sion

will also include mapped vocabulary from

the Sears List of Subject Headings under a licens-ing

agreement with H. W. Wilson.

500 Science

510 Mathematics

512 Algebra, number theory

512.3 Fields

Class here field theory,

Galois theory

Class linear algebra in 512.5;

class number theory in 512.7

125 years of proving “ ever more widely useful”

1911– 7th Edition

published, first to have

Forest Press imprint

1885– 2nd Edition

published under Melvil

Dewey’s name

1900– 1st Abridged

Edition published

1916– First ALA advisory

committee, the Decimal

Classification Advisory

Committee, appointed

1876– A Classification and Subject Index

for Cataloguing and Arranging Books and

Pamphlets of a Library ... the first edition of

Dewey Decimal Classification, published

anonymously in Amherst, Massachusetts

1876– A Classification and Subject index

for Cataloguing and Arranging Books and

Pamphlets of a Library… the first edition of the

Dewey Decimal Classification, published

anonymously in Amherst, Massachusetts

D E W E Y T U R N S 1 2 5

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 29

Dewey is not just a library classification sys-tem;

it is a general knowledge- organization tool.

Melvil Dewey set out 125 years ago to provide a

better system of organization for the information

inside library walls. Today, libraries have an infor-mation

challenge that goes beyond the bricks and

mortar of individual institutions. Libraries need

to provide access cooperatively to information

that is local, regional, national and global in

nature. Dewey is a lingua franca in the global

information space.

Through continuous updating, mapping of

other vocabularies, and translations into multiple

languages, we have nurtured and expanded the

DDC into an unparalleled global knowledge-organization

resource. Dewey is already being

explored as the underlying browsing structure in

the Renardus project, which links subject gateways

across Europe. We have worked with the National

Library of New Zealand to reflect the primary

school curriculum in subject headings associated

with Dewey. The Colorado Digitization Project is

studying Dewey as a browsing structure across

diverse information providers— libraries of all

kinds, museums and historical societies. And here

at OCLC, the Office of Research is involved in a

number of projects focused on expanding the

terminology base in Dewey, improving automatic

classification techniques, and developing Dewey

as a browsing tool for the electronic information

environment. Surely, it seems that Melvil Dewey’s

scheme has held up well these last 125 years and is

prepared to meet evolving knowledge- organization

needs.— Joan S. Mitchell is executive director,

OCLC Forest Press, and editor in chief, Dewey

Decimal Classification.

• • •

The Decimal Classification Editorial Policy

Committee ( EPC) is a 10- member interna-tional

board whose main function is to

advise OCLC Forest Press on matters relat-ing

to changes, innovations and the general

development of the DDC. The committee

reviews every update to the DDC during

semi- annual meetings at the Library of

Congress and electronically between meet-ings.

EPC includes official representatives

of the American Library Association, the

Library Association ( United Kingdom), and

the Library of Congress. Current members

hail from academic, public, special and

national libraries and library schools in

Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and

the United States. Andrea Stamm

( Northwestern University) is chair of EPC;

Lucy Evans ( British Library) is vice- chair.

• • •

Decimal Classification Editorial Policy Committee

1930– Library of Congress

began printing Dewey

numbers on catalog cards

1931– Melvil Dewey

dies Dec. 10

1953– Decimal Classification

Editorial Policy Committee

reconstituted to represent ALA,

Forest Press and the Library of

Congress to guide the editorial

development of the DDC

1923– DDC

editorial office

moved to the

Library of

Congress

1958– 16th Edition

published, first to be edited

under agreement between

the Library of Congress

and Forest Press

1937– Decimal Classification

Committee, a forerunner to

the present Decimal

Classification Editorial Policy

Committee, established

30 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

In 1924, when Melvil Dewey transferred

the copyrights for the DDC to Forest Press,

he expressed the hope that it would

be made “ ever more widely useful.”

I would like to thank and acknowledge the

generations of editors and librarians who

have continued to make the DDC a dynamic,

living classification tool.

I would also like to congratulate Joan Mitchell

and the current editorial staff on this anniversary.

Thank you, Joan, for your leadership and

dedication to making the DDC “ ever more widely

useful.” Melvil Dewey would be proud.

— Jay Jordan

D E W E Y T U R N S 1 2 5

Dewey’s 125th anniversary

celebrated at IFLA

During the International Federation of Library

Associations and Institutions ( IFLA) annual con-ference

in August, nearly 200 delegates from six

continents gathered on the skywalk of the

Prudential Center in Boston to commemorate

the 125th anniversary of the publication of the

DDC. Attendees included national librarians,

translation partners, and officials from IFLA and

other library associations. Following opening

remarks by Joan Mitchell, executive director,

OCLC Forest Press, Winston Tabb, associate

librarian of Congress for Library Services, Library

of Congress, spoke about the special relation-ship

between the Library of Congress and

Dewey. Jay Jordan, OCLC president and CEO,

closed with observations on Dewey’s future and

a toast to 125 years of the DDC.

Christine Deschamps, IFLA and OCLC Board of Trustees, and

Jay Jordan, OCLC

D E W E Y T U R N S 1 2 5

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 31

Wanda Dole,

Washburn

University; Phyllis

Spies, OCLC

Worldwide

Library Services;

and Ralph

Manning,

National Library

of Canada

Marie- France Plassard, IFLA Universal Bibliographic Control and

International MARC Programme; Olayemi Omolayole, National Library of

Nigeria; Joan Mitchell, OCLC Forest Press; and Patrice Landry, Swiss

National Library

photos by Photo Atlantic

Lynne Brindley, British Library, and Meg Bellinger,

OCLC Digital and Preservation Resources

Willy van der Pijpen, Royal Library of Belgium; Regina Varniene,

National Library of Lithuania; and Nick Rawson, OCLC Europe,

the Middle East & Africa

Octavio Rojas, Infoenlace Ltda. ( Colombia,

Ecuador and Peru) and Nancy London,

OCLC Library Services

D E W E Y T U R N S 1 2 5

32 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

by Winston Tabb

The Library of Congress’ relationship with the

Dewey Decimal Classification reaches back

through more than 100 years of the classifi-cation’s

125- year history. In a real sense, this rela-tionship

predates the library’s extended courtship

with its own classification, the LCC, which owes

its very existence to Melvil Dewey. And to his

firmness in declining to modify the sixth edition

of the DDC in 1899, when Charles Martel and

James Hanson, the library’s cataloging and classifi-cation

activists of that era, requested him to

expand and revise it considerably— within one

year’s time— for the library’s use. Upon Dewey’s

refusal, the library launched its own efforts to

arrange the world of knowledge and books, not

from 000 to 999, but from A to Z. In government

fashion, Z, of course, was finished first ( about

1910), and we have yet to complete the final sub-class

of Class K for religious law— though I assure

you we are close. So what Mr. Dewey declined to

do within one year has taken the library more

than one century to accomplish!

There were no hard feelings over the Dewey

rejection— or if so they evaporated fairly quickly,

for the Dewey editorial office found a home in

the library in 1923, since which time there has

been a continuous Dewey physical presence

under our roof. Dewey and his followers recog-nized

this truth about building, maintaining and

refreshing a comprehensive classification scheme;

to do so one must be surrounded, engulfed,

awash in a sea of books. What better describes

the Library of Congress of the time, when the vig-orous

Herbert Putnam was adding to our collec-tions

at unprecedented rates. Having access to all

those books was the key to keeping the DDC rele-vant

and rejuvenated on a regular basis.

For seven years the Dewey presence at the

library was strictly an editorial one: in essence

space was rented to further production of new

editions of the DDC. In 1930, at the request of

the library’s Card Division— which was seeking

ways to provide “ added value” to its by- then long-established

business of sharing the library’s cata-loging

with the outside world via printed

cards— the assignment of Dewey numbers was

undertaken. From small beginnings focused on

English language materials only, this aspect of

The Library of Congress and the DDC

Winston Tabb, associate librarian of Congress for Library Services, Library of

Congress, delivered this address on Aug. 21 at a reception celebrating the 125th

anniversary of the DDC during the International Federation of Library Associations

and Institutions Conference in Boston, Massachusetts.

1988– Forest

Press becomes

part of OCLC

2002– WebDewey and

Abridged WebDewey

planned for release

1996– 21st Edition and Dewey for

Windows published, first edition to

be published simultaneously in both

print and electronic formats

1993– Electronic Dewey

published, first library

classification scheme in

electronic form

2000– WebDewey

in CORC released

1999– Forest Press office moved

from Albany, New York, to OCLC

headquarters in Dublin, Ohio

D E W E Y T U R N S 1 2 5

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 33

Dewey work has gradually grown to the point

that about 110,000 bibliographic records now

receive Dewey assignments each year. That rep-resents

about two- thirds of our “ full cataloging”

output. Every Cataloging- in- Publication title

includes Dewey information— this in itself

accounts for nearly 60,000 titles per year— and

the remainder includes titles in English, Spanish,

French, German, Italian and Portuguese. The

numbers assigned represent the standard of

authoritative Dewey classifying; and the dissemi-nation

of these authoritative numbers to the

worldwide Dewey community has certainly been

a major factor in maintaining Dewey’s well-earned

position as the world’s most used library

classification system.

Back to very brief history. The ’ 30s, ’ 40s and

early ’ 50s were not always easy years in the

Dewey/ LC life cycle. Several controversial editions

embroiled all the parties in complex maneuvers to

find the right direction. Editors came and went

quickly. The Librarian of Congress himself was

sometimes a participant in this drama. In 1953 the

Lake Placid Education Foundation and the Library

of Congress agreed that the editorial responsibility

for producing the DDC would lie with the library.

David Haykin became the first “ LC” editor, but after

one unsatisfactory edition he resigned and in 1956

was replaced by Benjamin Custer.

“ Mister Custer” as he is remembered affection-ately

by the several staff still on active Dewey

duty who worked for him, was the much- needed

pacifier and consolidator who guided Dewey

work at the library for the next 25 years while

fathering DDC editions 16, 17, 18 and 19. The

Decimal Classification Division was created when

he took the reins, and the structure of this divi-sion

( whose mission statement, succinct and to

the point, reads: to develop, apply, and assist in

the use of the Dewey Decimal Classification) has

remained unchanged to this day— not even being

affected by the reorganization of the rest of our

Cataloging Directorate in the early 1990s.

The great change of the 1990s was, to be sure,

a reversion to the original pattern: the editorship

of the DDC no longer to lie with the library, but

rather with the classification’s owners. Following

Editor John Comaromi’s death in 1991, the library

could not refill this position— nor in fact could it

fill any position at all— the result of a court-ordered

moratorium as part of the settlement of

litigation involving the library’s hiring practices.

Both LC and OCLC recognized the impossibility

of proceeding without an editor for an undeter-mined

period, and the result of our discussions is

well known to all: the editor to be an OCLC

employee, not an LC employee.

Joan Mitchell’s assumption of the editorship

could have led to philosophical, organizational

and operational difficulties, but it did none of

those things. Our two organizations responded to

the new setup with ease, principally because Joan

proved to be that rare bird in Dewey’s editorial

history: someone remarkably easy with whom to

work. When she also assumed the role of execu-tive

director of OCLC Forest Press, replacing that

courtly, able and eminently reasonable gentleman,

Peter Paulson, it simplified further our dealings

with OCLC, though I am sure it increased her

own workload far beyond her expectations. In

any case, with OCLC funding the Decimal

Classification Division’s editorial team ( Julianne

Beall, Winton Matthews and Gregory New are pre-sent

this evening), and with Joan setting the

agenda, we have continued to build the DDC

toward the next Dewey milestone: publication of

DDC Edition 22 in 2003.

Though this recapitulation oversimplifies the

many years of the library’s involvement with the

Dewey Decimal Classification, I think it makes

clear how intimate the relationship has been.

From our role as rejected suitor to that of co-conspirator,

we have been a commanding pres-ence

in the adult life cycle of the Dewey Decimal

Classification. On the 125th anniversary of the

DDC, I salute it and the library’s thread woven so

deeply into its fabric.

• • •

Winston Tabb, Library of Congress; Joan Mitchell, OCLC Forest

Press; and Jay Jordan, OCLC, at the DDC 125th anniversary

reception

Photo Atlantic

D E W E Y T U R N S 1 2 5

34 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

by Dawn Lawson

In the eight years since

1993, when the Dewey

Decimal Classification

became the first classifica-tion

system available in elec-tronic

form to users, it has

had to undergo several

metamorphoses to keep

pace with the rapidly chang-ing

world of hardware and software. The original

MS- DOS- based 5.25- inch floppy disk ( remember

those?),“ Electronic Dewey,” became “ Dewey for

Windows” software, offered on a 16- bit Windows

3.1- compatible CD- ROM. Dewey for Windows

was made compatible with subsequent versions

of Windows. July 2000 marked the debut of

WebDewey in CORC, a browser- based version of

the DDC available only to OCLC cataloging mem-bers.

The next major changes are set for early

2002.

January will see the release of a significantly

enhanced version of WebDewey in CORC, under

a new name, WebDewey ( OCLC Cataloging

Services Edition). At the same time we will be

launching a new service, called simply

WebDewey, which will be available to all libraries,

regardless of OCLC cataloging membership

status. Both will be based on the same database,

and the interfaces will be identical as well.

Production of the Dewey for Windows CD- ROM

will cease at the same time.

The DDC 21 database provides the content for

both editions of WebDewey. The database con-tains

everything from the print Edition 21 of the

Dewey Decimal Classification, as well as the many

significant editorial changes that have been made

to that material since its publication in four

bound volumes in 1996.

In addition, the database includes a large num-ber

of Library of Congress Subject Headings

( LCSH) that have been mapped to Dewey num-bers

in two ways: intellectually and statistically.

The intellectual mappings are done by the Dewey

editorial staff, who keep an eye on LC Subject

Headings Weekly Lists for new subject headings

of interest and select Dewey numbers to associate

with them. Recent new intellectual mappings

have included such LCSH as digital signatures

( 005.82) and Dogbert ( 741.5973). Intellectual

mappings come into the

database via routes other

than the weekly lists as

well. The editors map

selected LC subject head-ings

during the course of

editing and updating

Dewey schedules. The

January 2002 release of

WebDewey will also

include many intellectual

mappings from People,

Places & Things, a hot- off-the-

press print publication

from Forest Press, consist-ing

of some 50,000 popular

Library of Congress Subject

Headings mapped to

Dewey numbers.

The statistical mappings

derive from work done in

the OCLC Office of

Research under the direc-tion

of Diane Vizine- Goetz.

For nearly a decade, she

and her staff have been

fine- tuning algorithms that

they then apply to WorldCat

You’ve come a long way, Dewey!

A WebDewey record

D E W E Y T U R N S 1 2 5

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 35

to derive the most frequently used LCSH- DDC

number pairs. January’s WebDewey releases will

feature statistical mappings based on their most

recently refined algorithm.

Two additional members will join the

WebDewey family of products in early 2002:

Abridged WebDewey ( OCLC Cataloging Services

Edition) and Abridged WebDewey. The debut of

these two products marks the first time that an

abridged edition of the classification has been

available to its users in electronic form. The rela-tionships

between these two products will be

analogous to those of the WebDewey products.

Abridged WebDewey ( OCLC Cataloging Services

Edition) will be available to cataloging members

within the CORC environment, and Abridged

WebDewey, based on the same database and with

an identical interface, will be available to all

libraries, regardless of OCLC cataloging member-ship

status, in a separate environment.

These two products will be based on the

enhanced Abridged Edition 13 database, which

has the contents of the one- volume print edition,

published in 1997, all editorial updates, intellectu-ally

mapped LCSH, and mappings between

abridged Dewey numbers and the latest edition of

H. W. Wilson’s Sears List of Subject Headings.

Statistically mapped LCSH will be added in the

future. Some of the intellectual mappings in

Abridged WebDewey come from Subject

Headings for Children, an OCLC Forest Press

print publication listing associations between

abridged Dewey numbers and LCSH most fre-quently

applied to children’s materials.

All web versions of the DDC are updated quar-terly

in terms of content and functionality. While

adapting and changing the electronic versions of

the classification to keep pace with hardware and

software innovations, OCLC Forest Press has also

maintained a steady dialogue with users over the

years and implemented many of the enhancement

requests they have received in the course of such

dialogue. One request was to give users the abil-ity

to annotate electronic versions to reflect local

classification practices. This feature was imple-mented

in Dewey for Windows and expanded sig-nificantly

over time. It is also coming to all the

web versions in 2002.

One early venue for dialogue with users, the

Electronic Dewey user group meetings, eventually

became the Dewey Update Breakfast. Held at the

American Library Association meetings and other

major conferences, the breakfast update covers

Forest Press activities and includes a segment on

the latest developments on the electronic product

front. The subsequent question- and- answer ses-sion

is one way the Dewey editorial team and

OCLC development staff learn what enhance-ments

users would like to see the soonest.

Smaller focus group meetings are also held at ALA

and other conferences. Additional user feedback

is obtained when training workshops are held by

the OCLC regional service providers.

The quarterly updates made to the WebDewey

services provide the shortest timeframe to date in

which to implement user- driven functionality

enhancements. This rapid give- and- take between

users and OCLC staff is gratifying for both sides,

and with the introduction of the various new web

versions next year, it is likely to become richer

and more mutually beneficial than ever.— Dawn

Lawson is senior electronic products manager,

OCLC Forest Press.

• • •

An LC authority record

D E W E Y T U R N S 1 2 5

36 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

by Libbie Crawford

People, Places & Things is

designed to help library

users find the right places

to browse for information

organized by the Dewey

Decimal Classification

( DDC) system. The 422-

page publication provides a

list of over 50,000 Library of

Congress Subject Headings ( LCSH) paired with

corresponding DDC numbers. The list of head-ings

includes personal, corporate- body and geo-graphic

names; and topical and title headings.

People, Places & Things is based on the previ-ous

experience using records from WorldCat in

developing the two editions of Subject Headings

for Children. An additional source is the research

done by Chan and Vizine- Goetz on the correlation

between frequency of subject use and validity

[ Lois Mai Chan and Diane Vizine- Goetz. 1998.

Toward a Computer— Generated Subject Valida-tion

File: Feasibility and Usefulness. Library

Resources & Technical Services: 42: 45- 60].

In developing People Places & Things, the edi-tors

identified WorldCat records with DDC num-bers

( MARC tag 082) and subject headings ( MARC

tags 600- 651) assigned by the Library of Congress

( LC). The DDC number and the first LCSH were

extracted from each record. The editors then

applied a term co- occurrence measure to identify

candidate pairs. Frequency counts were used to

restrict the candidate pairs to those with headings

that had been used at least five times.

Data files were prepared with the LCSH, the

Dewey number, the DDC Relative Index entry

closest to the LCSH, and the caption associated

with the DDC number. In addition to the heading-number

pairs derived from WorldCat records,

heading- number pairs were added from other

sources. These included editorially mapped head-ings

from WebDewey, headings from Subject

Headings for Children, and headings used in

the OCLC NetFirst database, all accompanied by

Dewey numbers. The resulting list contained

over 50,000 headings and the DDC number or

numbers most frequently associated with each

heading.

The heading- number pairs were then labeled

to indicate which ones needed further review. If

the heading and its corresponding number were

exactly the same as the heading and correspond-ing

number in the DDC Relative Index or the edi-torially

mapped heading and its corresponding

number in the WebDewey database, the entry was

labeled as approved. Heading- number pairs from

Subject Headings for Children and NetFirst head-ings

were labeled as provisionally approved.

Headings paired with invalid numbers from old

editions of the DDC were flagged.

The list was sorted in DDC number order and

divided by subject area, and then given to the edi-tor

with expertise in each area. The subject head-ings

and classification numbers were edited for

accuracy and currency. When forms, time peri-ods,

places or other subdivisions were included in

the subject headings, either the Dewey numbers

were adjusted to reflect those subdivisions or

additional Dewey numbers were added.

Consistent policies were followed in determining

which numbers would be assigned to certain kinds

of headings, e. g., a social group received a number

both in 305 and in 930- 990. When an LCSH with a

subheading was in the list but the LCSH without

the subheading was not, the missing LCSH was

usually added. Questions were resolved by con-sultation

with the other editors.

People, Places & Things introduced

People, Places & Things: A List of

Popular Library of Congress Subject

Headings with Dewey Numbers.

2001. 422p. Paper. ISBN 0- 910608- 69- 5.

People, Places & Things may be

ordered from the Forest Press web site

< http:// www. oclc. org/ fp/>.

D E W E Y T U R N S 1 2 5

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 37

The combined list was then checked from

A to Z for consistency. Two additional sources

of headings were added to the list during the final

stage. First, nearly 2,500 selected headings with

high frequency of use in WorldCat in popular

areas such as history, literature and music were

added to the file with Dewey numbers assigned

by the Dewey editors. Second, headings that had

been selected by the editors from the LC Subject

Headings Weekly Lists and added to WebDewey

since the original merge were added to the file.

Because the preferred version of a subject head-ing

can change over time ( e. g., the form “ Afro-

American” was changed to “ African American”

during the editing stage), all headings were

verified for currency. The Dewey numbers associ-ated

with any changed headings were reviewed.

People, Places & Things reflects current LC and

Dewey practice through April 2001.

People, Places & Things guides information

seekers to Dewey numbers that are often assigned

in conjunction with certain subject headings.

Additionally, People, Places & Things can assist

classifiers in application of the DDC. It also is a

source of vocabulary enhancement to the DDC

database. OCLC Forest Press expects to include

many of these subject heading mappings in a

future release of WebDewey.— Libbie Crawford

is marketing manager, OCLC Forest Press.

• • •

P R O D U C T N E W S

38 OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001

OCLC has enhanced WorldCat on the OCLC

FirstSearch service by adding expanded search

options and descriptive content to help users

more easily identify materials.

New icons on the search and results screens

indicate the physical format of materials in the

records. These improvements increase visibility

for the wide variety of resources OCLC member

libraries have collected and cataloged in

WorldCat.

The addition of icons representing the major

physical formats in WorldCat as search limiters

will help users more easily target searches to

materials in particular formats, such as books or

video tapes. More detailed format information in

search results will enable easy identification of

the most relevant items in results lists.

OCLC is also adding tables of contents, cover

art, book summaries and notes about authors to

bibliographic records for current popular material.

Users can find these new features on a full record

display. This descriptive content in WorldCat is

provided by Ingram Library Services, one of the

world’s largest book and video distributors.

Users may also search for a particular language

using a list of the 30 most common languages in

WorldCat or the full list of more than 400

languages present in the database. In addition,

users can now pinpoint items in WorldCat that

are held in their own local libraries.

“ By responding to requests from our users,

OCLC is making WorldCat easier to use and more

valuable to libraries,” said Frank Hermes, vice

president, OCLC Marketing and Planning. “ OCLC

supports the position of libraries as premier

information providers by providing their users

with better and more intuitive tools to find what

they are looking for. These enhancements to

FirstSearch will help users identify and focus on

the best resources in their search for

information.”

The OCLC FirstSearch service is designed for

librarians and library users and accommodates

expert and novice searchers alike. FirstSearch

provides access to more than 70 databases includ-ing

the OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections

Online service. Most databases show library hold-ings

from WorldCat ( the OCLC Online Union

Catalog) to point users to resources in their

library’s own collections. FirstSearch came online

in 1991. More information about FirstSearch,

including a guided tour, is available on OCLC’s

web site < http:// www. oclc. org/ firstsearch/>.

• • •

OCLC announces enhancements

to WorldCat in FirstSearch

P R O D U C T N E W S

OCLC Newsletter November/ December 2001 39

OCLC has combined the OCLC ArticleFirst data-base

with the OCLC ContentsFirst database and

added bibliographic records from the OCLC

FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online service.

The enhanced ArticleFirst database, available via

the OCLC FirstSearch service, is now a single

serials- content resource for libraries and their

users.

Library staff and users can now browse journal

tables of contents in ArticleFirst, as they do in the

Electronic Collections Online database. Clicking

on the Browse Journals and Magazines link

within the FirstSearch search interface allows

them to view tables of contents for individual

periodicals.

Enhancements to OCLC ArticleFirst promote better

browsing, streamlined searching

Click on the Browse Journals and

Magazines link to navigate to the

tables of contents.

Click on a title in the alphabetic list

to go to its journal information

page. Click on the Current Issue

link to jump to the table of

contents.

P R O D U C