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OCLC

Technical Services

Forum, London

18 November 2009

Karen CalhounVice President, WorldCat & Metadata Services, OCLC

Online Catalogues: What Users and Librarians Want Online Catalogues: What Users and Librarians Want

• Why have we built collections?

• Collection development means “to privilege particular objects as being more useful or reliable than others”

• How is privileging possible when the universe is accessible in 5 seconds?

• Do we know what the collection is?

Ross Atkinson, 1946-2006 Community, Collaboration, and Collections Ross Atkinson, 1946-2006 Community, Collaboration, and Collections

http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/2608/1/Atkinson_Talk.pdf

Janus Conference

“None of these challenges can be met by research libraries working independently. They can only be confronted collectively … Collection development has gone as far as it can go by operating as a set of unilateral city states.”

OutlineOutline

1. What is the future of library collections and online catalogues?

2. What sorts of materials do scholars, students, and citizens use? How are libraries doing at providing these?

3. User-centered design and “quality” in the user workflow from discovery to delivery

4. What are OCLC’s strategies for helping libraries support discovery and delivery of quality information?

Trends in Librarianship and LibrariesTrends in Librarianship and Libraries

Competition for Resources to Assign to New Initiatives in Libraries Competition for Resources to Assign to New Initiatives in Libraries

• Engage with institutional or community-based repositories

• Scholarly publishing expertise/communications

• Support for digital asset management in the communities served

• New services for [fill in the blank]

• Develop new alliances, partnerships

• Reveal “hidden collections”

• Integrate library into learning management systems, teaching and research, portals, scholar’s workstation, personal productivity tools

• 24/7 access

• Major space renovation

• Offsite storage

• Next generation systems

Source Mackenzie Smith, NISO Forum on LRMS ©MIT, 2009

A TIME OF TRANSITION FOR LIBRARY COLLECTIONS AND CATALOGUES A TIME OF TRANSITION FOR LIBRARY COLLECTIONS AND CATALOGUES

Photo: Quite Adepthttp://www.flickr.com/photos/quiteadept/4082692761/

What’s the Value of the Print Collections and Collection- Centered Services? Median Circulation and Reference Transactions in ARL Libraries 1991-2008, With Five Year Forecast

What’s the Value of the Print Collections and Collection- Centered Services? Median Circulation and Reference Transactions in ARL Libraries 1991-2008, With Five Year Forecast

Data source: ARL Statistics 2007-2008http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/arlstat08.pdf

“65% of information requestsoriginate off-campus”--Discoverability report, p. 4

What’s the Value of the Print Collections?What’s the Value of the Print Collections?

$108 millionRenovation of OhioState University Library:“The books had come to clutter thelibrary”

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Library-Renovation-at Ohio/4700

Percentage Change in Median Resources Per Student at ARL Libraries, 2000-2008 (Compared to 2000)

Percentage Change in Median Resources Per Student at ARL Libraries, 2000-2008 (Compared to 2000)

Change in Staff, Volumes Added, Monographs Purchased Per Student

Change in E-Serials ExpendituresPer Student

Data source: ARL Statistics 2007-2008http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/arlstat08.pdf

An Early Earthquake: Where Do You Begin an Online Search for Information on a Topic?

An Early Earthquake: Where Do You Begin an Online Search for Information on a Topic?

Starting an Information Search

89

20

20

40

60

80

100

Search engine Library Web site

Where Search Begins

Perc

ent

(2005) College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources: a Report to the OCLC Membership: http://www.oclc.org/reports/perceptionscollege.htm

What Types of Collections Do Catalogues Generally Describe? What Types of Collections Do Catalogues Generally Describe?

Types of Materials Described in the WorldCat Cataloguing Database, 1999-2008

Will the Catalogue Survive In Its Present Form? “Within the next five years …

Will the Catalogue Survive In Its Present Form? “Within the next five years …

…there will no longer be a monolithic library Web site. Instead library data will be pushed out to many starting places on the Web and directly to users.”

--Provocative Statement #6, Taiga Forum

…we’ll be past the notion that the online catalog is the way you find things in libraries.”

--Interviewee for LC report

http://www.taigaforum.org/documents/ProvocativeStatements.pdfhttp://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf, p. 35

Revised Google Books Settlement, 14 November 2009 Revised Google Books Settlement, 14 November 2009

• Includes digitized books from the US, UK, Australia and Canada

• Will create an independent, non-profit Book Rights Registry (BRR) to locate and represent rightholders

• Provides for the sale of institutional subscriptions for online access

WHAT SORTS OF MATERIALS ARE BEING USED? HOW ARE LIBRARIES DOING AT PROVIDING THESE?

WHAT SORTS OF MATERIALS ARE BEING USED? HOW ARE LIBRARIES DOING AT PROVIDING THESE?

The National Science Digital Library (U.S.)

Rising Interest in Digital Collections on the BnF and LC Web Sites Rising Interest in Digital Collections on the BnF and LC Web Sites

Source: Alexa.com, 15 Nov 2009

Where do people go on bnf.fr and loc.gov?

BnF:Expositions: 30%Catalogue: 26%Gallica: 26%

LC:American Memory: 41%Catalog: 17%Legislative information (THOMAS): 6%

Open Access Repositories Gaining Visibility and Impact Open Access Repositories Gaining Visibility and Impact

Sources: Alexa.com 15 Nov 2009 and the Cybermetrics Lab’s ranking of top Repositories (disciplinary and institutional) athttp://repositories.webometrics.info/about.html

2008-2009 TrafficCompared:

*Social Science ResearchNetwork

*arXiv.org*Research Papers in

Economics*British Library (bl.uk)

Institutionalrepository

Digital collections

CitationDBs

Full Text DBs E-books

An Increasingly Complex, Demanding Local Environment to Support An Increasingly Complex, Demanding Local Environment to Support

Onlinecatalog

ILS Acquisitions dataCirc/status dataPrint holdings data

Link resolver

KnowledgeBase(s)

E-resource management system (ERM)

The end user perspective: a fragmented, confusing library landscape The end user perspective: a fragmented, confusing library landscape

InstitutionalRepository

Digital collections

Web Lists

CitationDBs

Full Text DBs

E-books

OnlineCatalogRecords

OnlineCatalogRecords

PrintedBooks &Serials, AV, Maps.Etc.

(sometimes)

USER-CENTERED DESIGN AND “QUALITY” IN THE WORKFLOW FROM DISCOVERY TO DELIVERY

USER-CENTERED DESIGN AND “QUALITY” IN THE WORKFLOW FROM DISCOVERY TO DELIVERY

Source of image and tag line: Experientia web site

Today’s libraries exist in physical and virtual space. A library is thus both a manifest place and an experienceof real, but intangible, “cyberspace” for those who interact with it. One may describe a library system in termsof the relationships between users, collections, library staff,and space, with “space” defined both as buildings and as virtual, networked information space.

--Cornell University Library. 2003. MAS2010: Models for AcademicSupport: Report to the Mellon Foundationhttp://www.library.cornell.edu/MAS/MAS2010%20Final%20Report.pdf

Another Type of Space: : The Virtual Library (Embedded, on the Web) Another Type of Space: : The Virtual Library (Embedded, on the Web)

Core Values

“Discoverability” Report: University of Minnesota Libraries, February 2009 http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/48258

“Discoverability” Report: University of Minnesota Libraries, February 2009 http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/48258

Trends

DISCOVERING RESOURCES OUTSIDE LIBRARY SYSTEMS DISCOVERING RESOURCES OUTSIDE LIBRARY SYSTEMS

Geocentric/Aristotelian view:The local catalog is thesun

Heliocentric/Copernican view:The local catalogis a planet

Data Synchronization and Syndication Data Synchronization and Syndication

WorldCat & WorldCat Partners…

Data synch

Many other partners

Wikipedia

Facebook

What is Syndication?What is Syndication?

Low resolution image of copyrighted work used for commentary on the topicof syndication. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Features_Syndicate

For news features like comics, syndication publishes the feature in multiple newspapers simultaneously.

Web syndication makes website material available to multiple other sites.

WorldCat PartnersWorldCat Partners

Google, Google Books, Google Scholar HCI Bibliography :

Human-Computer Interaction Resources

http://www.oclc.org/worldcatorg/overview/partnersites/default.htm

WorldCat: Global Integrator, Driving Searches to Libraries WorldCat: Global Integrator, Driving Searches to Libraries

Pushing metadata out, pulling users in:

It’s all about linking metadata

USERS EXPECT DISCOVERY AND DELIVERY TO COINCIDE USERS EXPECT DISCOVERY AND DELIVERY TO COINCIDE

“Quality” in the User Workflow from Discovery to Delivery “Quality” in the User Workflow from Discovery to Delivery

Library user studies suggest that users expect finding and getting information they want, when and where they want it, to be easy and convenient.

These users’ tolerance for barriers to easy andconvenient discovery and delivery is limited.

“A colleague … sang the praises of the digital world to us. He can now, he told us, get direct access to information …His enthusiasm had screened out an enormous array of people, organizations, and institutions involved in this “direct” touch. The university, the library, publishers, editors, referees, authors, the computer and infrastructure designers, the cataloguers and library collection managers, right down to the students working their way through college by [working in the library] had no place in his story.”

Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid. 2000. The social life of information. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

The (invisible) cloud of

complexity on the global

metadata network

The (invisible) cloud of

complexity on the global

metadata network

An End to End View of a High Quality Discovery to Delivery Process An End to End View of a High Quality Discovery to Delivery Process

TextPrintLicensedDigitalArchival

DataImagesSoundVideoMultimediaObjectsMore

Expectation:Easily Find It AND Easily

Get It

THE CATALOGUE IN TRANSITION THE CATALOGUE IN TRANSITION

Who is using the catalog?Who is using the catalog?

Meet the “user” – primary personas of worldcat.org Meet the “user” – primary personas of worldcat.org

Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want

End-Users expect online catalogs:

to look like popular Web sites

to have summaries, abstracts, tables of contents

to link directly to needed information

Librarians expect online catalogs:

to serve end users’ information needs

to help staff carry out work responsibilities

to have accurate, structured data

to exhibit classical principles of organization

http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/onlinecatalogs/default.htm

April 2009

Objectives of our metadata quality research Objectives of our metadata quality research

•Start over without assumptions about what “quality” is

•Identify and compare metadata expectations• End users

• Librarians

•Compare expectations of types of librarians

•Define a new WorldCat quality program …

•Taking into account the perspectives of all constituencies of WorldCat

• End users (and subgroups of end users)

• Librarians (and subgroups of librarians)

What did we learn?

End-user focus group results What did we learn?

End-user focus group results

Key observations:

• Delivery is as important, if not more important, than discovery.

• Seamless, easy flow from discovery through delivery is critical.

• Summaries and tables of contents are key elements of a description

• Improved search relevance is necessary.

Recommended enhancements to WorldCat Total end-user responses

End-User Results: Recommended Enhancements

4

Librarian/Staff Results: Highlighted Differences

9

1

Recommendations from librarian survey Recommendations from librarian survey

• Merge duplicates

• Make it easier to make corrections to records (fix typos; do upgrades); “social cataloging” experiment—Wikipedia

• More emphasis on accuracy/currency of library holdings

• Enrichment—TOCs, summaries, cover art—work with content suppliers, use APIs, etc.

DISCOVERY AND DELIVERY OF A WIDER RANGE OF INFORMATION OBJECTS DISCOVERY AND DELIVERY OF A WIDER RANGE OF INFORMATION OBJECTS

Research into use and users of digital library collections Research into use and users of digital library collections

“Digital libraries, far from being simple digital versions of library holdings, are now attracting a new type of public, bringing about new, unique and original ways for reading and understanding texts.”—BibUsages Study 2002 [3]

“The availability of primary sources has been crucial for the success of my teaching in history. Students have remarked what a difference it has made, and I have noticed a big difference between this course with the availability of online primary resources to those I have taught before that were based on printed resources.” –History instructor, University of California [2]

Usage of University of Wisconsin Digital Collections 2001-2008 [1]

R2 = 0.9701

0

1000000

2000000

3000000

4000000

5000000

6000000

7000000

8000000

9000000

10000000

2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

Mill

ions

of S

essi

ons/

Use

s

“The function of searching across collections is a dream frequently discussed but seldom realized at a robust level. This paper … discusses how we might move from isolated digital collections to interoperable digital libraries.”

—Howard Besser [4]

Digital libraries >> Digital library aggregators Digital libraries >> Digital library aggregators

*Slovenian government web page, 10 Nov 2002—Internet Archive Wayback machine

*

Metadata Aggregation for Digital Library Content: Gallica in OAIster in WorldCat

Metadata Aggregation for Digital Library Content: Gallica in OAIster in WorldCat

More info: http://www.oclc.org/oaister/default.htm

More Metadata SourcesMore Metadata Sources

WorldCat Identities http://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-

n80-17868

WorldCat Identities http://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-

n80-17868

Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) http://viaf.org/ http://viaf.org/viaf/196844

Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) http://viaf.org/ http://viaf.org/viaf/196844

WHAT USERS AND LIBRARIANS WANT WHAT USERS AND LIBRARIANS WANT

Everywhere, the LibraryEverywhere, the Library

Library as Place Place as Library

Photo: jamesheadhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/headjames/2665919500/

Bringing writers, readers, and libraries together Bringing writers, readers, and libraries together

• Local catalog linked to a chain of services

• Infrastructure to permit global, national or regional, and local discovery and delivery of information among open, loosely-coupled systems

• Critical mass of digitized publications, special collections, and born digital materials online

• Many starting points on the Web leading to many types of information objects

• Intregrate library-managed collections and online spaces for researchers into the user’s workflow on the network

Derring-doDerring-do

Digital Collections Slide - CitationsDigital Collections Slide - Citations

[1] Data source for chart: University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center. Summary Statistics. http://uwdcc.library.wisc.edu/usageStats/publicView.shtml

[2] Quote from survey respondent as reported in Harley, Diane. 2007. Use and users of digital resources. Educause Quarterly 4, p. 12-20. http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EQM0742.pdf

[3a] Assadi, Houssem, et al. 2002. Use and users of online digital libraries in France. (BibUsages project) http://bibnum.bnf.fr/usages/bibusages_ecdl2003.pdf

And

[3b] Lupovici, Catherine, and Lesquins, Noémie. 2007. Gallica 2.0: a second life for the Bibliothèque nationale de France digital library. http://www.ifla.org.sg/IV/ifla73/papers/146-Lupovici-en.pdf

[4] Besser, Howard. 2002. The next stage: moving from digital collections to interoperable digital libraries. First Monday 7:6. http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/958/879

Thank You!

Karen Calhoun calhounk@oclc.org http://community.oclc.org/metalogue/

Thank You!

Karen Calhoun calhounk@oclc.org http://community.oclc.org/metalogue/