Sponsors

OCLC

By Karen Calhoun and John Chapman (published on Metalogue, 10 December 2009)

Recently, LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche/Association of European Research Libraries) published new strategy documents outlining a vision for 2009-2012. The Strategic Plan identifies five priorities for this time period:

  • Scholarly communication
  • Digitisation and resource discovery
  • Heritage collections and preservation
  • Organisation and human resources
  • LIBER services

Last month, staff from OCLC and LIBER met in London to discuss how OCLC--a LIBER Gold Sponsor--can best support LIBER's plans. The group identified three of the above LIBER priorities as opportunities for fruitful collaboration.

Digitisation and resource discovery

EuropeanaTravel is an EU-funded project that will channel digital content from European national libraries and LIBER institutions into Europeana.eu, the portal providing access to Europe's digital cultural heritage. The project, described in an English-language fact sheet available from http://www.europeanatravel.eu/multilingual-resources.php started on 1 May 2009 and will run for two years. A joint LIBER-OCLC pilot study was suggested and is being explored. The purpose would be to look at technical and operational issues related to making EuropeanaTravel metadata visible in WorldCat as well.

Heritage collections and preservation

Building from OCLC's role as a service provider for CERL's HPB (Heritage of the Printed Book) database and existing cooperation between CERL and LIBER on the Heritage Collections and Preservation steering committee, a working group with members from CERL, LIBER and OCLC was suggested. The working group would initially focus on improving the HPB through better data synchronisation techniques.

Organisation and human resources

Due to mutual interest in the evolving roles of librarians in research libraries, it was suggested that LIBER and OCLC examine opportunities for collaborative investigation in this area, perhaps taking advantage of work done or underway in OCLC Research. Topics of possible interest include information literacy, librarians as liaisons, librarians in data-centric environments, bibliometrics, and library publishing roles.

Karen Calhoun, Vice President, WorldCat and Metadata Services for OCLC 

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