Registrations now open for November events

We've got some great events lined up for November, that registrations have just opened up for. Here are two that have recently crossed (or emanated from) my desk:

WorldCat Mashathon Seattle
Odegaard Undergraduate Library in Seattle, Washington
Thursday-Friday, November 5-6, 2009
9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.
University of Washington

Join fellow developers for the next two-day WorldCat Mashathon. The Seattle Mashathon will follow the same format as previous events in Amsterdam and New York. Participants will spend the two days brainstorming and coding mash-ups with Web services to take advantage of all that WorldCat, the world’s largest and most comprehensive bibliographic database, has to offer. Developers from the library community and beyond are encouraged to attend.

Why attend the WorldCat Mashathon?

*Brainstorm potential apps for the WorldCat Search API, our bibliographic grouping services and other OCLC Web services.
*Get a preview of the new WorldCat Basic API.
*Gain development access to 1.4 billion items from more than 10,000 libraries worldwide.
*Integrate these resources with many others to create innovative new services.
*Meet fellow developers across the information industry.
*Share your creative vision and be a part of the next wave of online library development.

Register now for the Mashathon


OCLC Digital Forum East: Convergence: Where Metadata and Access Meet for Digital Discovery and Delivery
Arlington Public Library in Arlington, Virginia
Thursday, November 5, 2009
8:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Arlington Public Library, Central Library

For the first time, OCLC will bring this popular event to the East Coast. Experts from the museum, archival and library communities will discuss current projects and initiatives that explore metadata creation for digital discovery and delivery. Among the distinguished speakers are:

*Dr. Youngok Choi, Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Science, The Catholic University of America
*Susan Chun, Principal, Cultural Heritage Consulting; Founder and Project Lead at Steve.Museum
*Dr. Jennifer Goldbeck, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College of Information Studies
*Taylor Surface, Director, Digital Content Management Services, OCLC
*Kate Thiemer, author of ArchivesNext blog, creator and manager of the "Best Archives on the Web," "Movers and Shakers in Archives" awards, as well as the "Archives 2.0" wiki

The Forum is designed to offer an intimate meeting setting where participants can share knowledge and create networks with other organizations. Join us for some small group discussion and networking with your peers. This is an ideal educational opportunity for librarians, archivists and museum staff who are charged with creating digital access to collections.

Register now for the Digital Forum East

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I saw all the tweets coming through about Digital Forum West--so East will not disappoint, I am sure. And what can I say about the Mashathon? I am totally biased, but it's a great way to immerse yourself with structured data and imagine what cool things you can do with it, for two days.

What about Cooperative Effects?

By Arthur Smith
Every time I glance at my RSS feeds I'm up over my boots in discussions about network effects. The example people give is the original Bell telephone concept (1908) that more telephones make each telephone more valuable. The positive effects of more telephones, eventually extend to people who don't own telephones. That is, networks create effects for those who don't directly contribute to the networks themselves. WorldCat.org affects every non-network child who listens to a book read by the librarian who found the book on WorldCat.

Working outside the USA, I'm often reminded of how our members, quite independently of OCLC itself, have the potential to extend the benefits of the cooperative resources to non-member librarians. Often, in fact, to people who may never have heard of OCLC.

Recently David Hirsch, Librarian for Middle Eastern Studies at UCLA, was a guest lecturer in Dakar. David's subject was not OCLC, but, more generically. cataloging, ILL, reference, etc. However, David chose Connexion and WorldCat.org as the platforms for his discussions, to give the librarians in Dakar their first introduction to OCLC.

William Kopycki, Middle East Studies Bibliographer at the University of Pennsylvania, was recently asked to teach courses in Armenia about WorldCat services. This was something the Armenian librarians had been introduced to through their participation in a consortium of multinational libraries called AMICAL. William also "taught OCLC" as part of the IFLA Meetings of Experts on an International Cataloging Code (IME ICC) in Cairo.



Thanks goes out once again to OCLC members who continue to generate positive network effects for the extended global community of libraries and library users.

Heading off to Hackathon

Hey everyone. I've been "head-down" the past few weeks, as we've come to say in our group. I've learned how to host Webinars--or at least I can say that I've wrestled with WebEx with the best of them.

Anyway, before I zip off to the very first WorldCat Hackathon in New York tomorrow (I'm so excited!!), I wanted to introduce a guest post from a fellow OCLC staffer, Arthur Smith. Arthur is the Director for Strategic Business Development in the Middle East and India. He keeps us on our toes and always has great insight into things, it seems to me. He sent a photo last week that I immediately wanted to share with you, because it speaks volumes about the incredible work that librarians do on a daily basis all over the world...

"Above the Fold"

One of the things that people frequently ask us is "What are you reading now?" Eric Childress has hooked up a feed from WorldCat to the front page of this blog to show what he's reading. Lorcan Dempsey's blog regularly features notes on his vast reading. I am almost done with Book 3 in my Laubach course, so I will be adding to that soon.

Now there's a new newsletter from OCLC Programs and Research and IBIS Communications called Above the Fold. In the words of Jim Michalko, Vice President, RLG Programs, "Our intent is to pull together articles that relate to the work of the RLG Partnership and the information context in which we're all operating -- but that you might not see in the course of your regular awareness routines. Each citation will include a short annotation explaining why we think the article may be of interest to you. And each note will be attributed to the staff member whose thoughts on the issue and its relevance can be tapped."

Free subscriptions to Above the Fold, and other OCLC newsletters, are available here.

Remembering Gary Houk

This week has been a difficult one for OCLC staff. On Monday, August 18, 2008, our friend and colleague, Gary R. Houk passed away after a long and courageous battle with cancer.

A person widely respected, liked and admired by his colleagues, Gary started at OCLC in 1974 as a programmer/analyst and held many technical leadership roles, rising through the ranks to senior management and serving over his career at OCLC as Vice President, Member Services, later as Vice President, Cataloging and Metadata Services, and most recently as Vice President, Corporate Information Technology and Business Integration.

Despite challenges with chemotherapy treatments and the reduced mobility associated with his medical condition over the last year and half, Gary -- as was his nature -- did not let his illness deter him from being an active and engaged leader at OCLC nor did he permit his illness to deny him the pleasure of taking part in his daughter’s wedding.

For myself, many of my colleagues, Gary’s family, and his numerous friends who attended a memorial service today at a local church, it was comforting to be reminded of Gary’s warmth, charm, good-humor, and his life’s love (his wife, Randi), his life’s joy (his daughter, Shannon), his love of family, his loyalties (Gary was a graduate and life-long supporter of The Ohio State University), his passions (his work at OCLC and his passion for the game of golf), his public-spiritedness (Gary served on many local civic and business organizations in Dublin), and his personal faith.

Described during the memorial service as a “larger-than-life” figure who leaves a larger-than-life hole in the fabric of the lives of those around him, Gary was for the many of us who had the pleasure to work for and with him over these many years, a reliable, ever-present, ever-well-informed, favored colleague and friend, a man with a keen mind, quick wit, the patience to give all ideas and concerns a fair hearing, and the generalship to get things done. As Gary was himself a change agent and embraced risk-taking, he admired such qualities in others and was often a sponsor and internal champion of people and ideas that pushed boundaries. And if you needed to know anything about Ohio State’s football program, Gary was the man to go to.

In his message to OCLC staff on Monday, Jay Jordan called Gary Houk “an exceptional colleague and leader who contributed greatly to OCLC’s success.” I know Gary would have liked this well-deserved tribute to his person and his good work.

That I and my fellow IAGers, and all of our colleagues at OCLC shall miss Gary is an understatement. We mourn the passing of our friend and colleague. And we’ll keep Gary’s family in our thoughts and prayers.

Links related to Gary Houk:

• Gary's WorldCat Identities page (Gary R. Houk)
  
• Gary Houk’s obituary in the Columbus Dispatch
  
• More (Google Books snippet) about Gary's career in his own words in Contemporary Chief Information Officers: Management Experiences (Hershey, PA: IGI Pub.), 2007
• Jenny Levine summarizes a 2005 presentation by Gary Houk, “Connecting Users to Library Services in an Amazoogle World: Trends in Information Discovery and Delivery,” here
  

OCLC Symposium in Washington, DC

As we have done for many years, OCLC will be hosting a Symposium at ALA Annual in DC. It will be June 22, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, at the Grand Hyatt Washington, Independence Ballroom A and registration is here. The topic of this one is related to our forthcoming report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in the Age of the Networked Community.

Title: Is the Library Open?

Hear from three experts on the issues of information privacy law, copyright, digital communication, intellectual property and patron privacy rights in relation to library policies.

The speakers are:
· Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and professor of privacy law at Georgetown University Law Center. "EPIC is a public interest research center in Washington, D.C. It was established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values. EPIC publishes an award-winning e-mail and online newsletter on civil liberties in the information age – the EPIC Alert."

· Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian, media scholar and an associate professor of culture and communication at New York University. He blogs at Sivacracy.net. A journalist before he became a professor, he has written several books (including The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System) as well as for many periodicals. And he's been on The Daily Show, but you can't see that clip on YouTube anymore because of the Viacom copyright claim.

· Mary Minow, a library law consultant with LibraryLaw.com, coauthor of The Library’s Legal Answer Book and a public librarian for 10 years. She is the coauthor with Tomas Lipinski of The Library's Legal Answer Book (ALA Editions: 2003). She blogs at LibraryLaw.Blog and says this about herself, "I studied library law, that is the combined study of First Amendment, Copyright, Local Government Law, Disability Law, Negotiations etc. Now what I care about is sharing the most practical parts of the law that I learned, the good, the bad and the ugly, with my former colleagues, the librarians of the world."

Surely in Doubt

“I feel rich,
I feel poor,
I'm in doubt,
I feel sure.”
“I Must Be In Love” – The Rutles (Web site ; WCid ; Wikipedia) (Song composed by Neil Innes)

Dateline: 1 April 2007

Well, it looks like we’ve been scooped!

Rumors of OCLC’s pending sale to a certain search appliance company have made a full round on the Web, and we at OCLC didn’t even get a memo! (N.B. Google did have an announcement today, but it wasn’t really OCLC-related...) Hrrmph!

I direct you to the following posts:
Google Buys OCLC, Announces New Products
Google Acquires OCLC, World Domination Near Total
Google Buying OCLC: An Early Analysis

This news represents a significant speed-up of the calendar for such a merger as rumored earlier by Ed Valauskas (as reported here) which gave us till at least 2014.

Frankly, we were hoping for the additional time to allow us to try and clean up those pesky ending-marks-of-punctuation* shortfalls in WorldCat (there is company lore that OCLC Research has a full-stop recycling bin in its office area – they take some full-stops out of the records, put the full-stops back in the records ; there have even been persistent rumors that our Dewey Services colleagues once thought about approaching ALA Editions to sell the surplus as micro-Dots (for those who remember poor Dot, a cheerful Dewey icon now relegated to a screensaver, sniff. ;( but ALA chose to offer other options instead (search "Dewey").)

“News” indeed! (Chuckle!)

Well in the spirit of things then, watch this space for the announcement of the availability of the Google WorldCat deluxe card catalog – 100M+ card sets and counting... ;)

(*For you non-catalogers, library cataloging rules provide simple-yet-difficult-to-follow rules regarding the correct marks of punctuation to separate different parts of a catalog entry. And yes, Alice, I can sense your eyes starting to glaze over now... ;)

[Image courtesty of Ben Ostrowsky]

YouTubing

Just as "Google"became a verb, so has "YouTube", I think. Just google the phrase "let's youtube." (Isn't that a sentence that would make a grammar purist wince?)

So, we've YouTubed. Our media production manager, Rich, took the many hours of film from the Symposium at ALA MidWinter (many because there was more than one camera) and edited it all down to just under three minutes, and loaded it to YouTube. I am biased of course but I think it's good. And I think OCLC is the first library-related company to have a video on YouTube...

Side Streets

“Till then I walk the side streets home,
Even when I’m on my own.”
“Side Streets” – Saint Etienne (Web site ; Wikipedia entry) from the album Tales from Turnpike House (Wikipedia entry)

Turnpike House is a real building in the London area, and the songs on Saint Etienne’s concept album, Tales from Turnpike House, weave flashes of several fictional character’s lives set in flats in the building. Reviews (sample reviews: 1, 2, 3) offer more backstory than I’ll offer here, but let’s just say the reviewers and I concur: Tales is the exception to the rule – this concept album actually works.

And speaking of concepts that work: OCLC Research has been working on a project called WorldCat Identities. Chief Scientist Thom Hickey – my boss – has been the lead on a project to build the infrastructure to automatically generate one HTML page per identity (i.e. an identity being character, person, animal, or organization, etc. referenced in selected fields in a bibliographic record) in WorldCat – about 19 million unique identities at last count. The pages draw from bibliographic data in WorldCat which is used in conjunction with authority file data to provide information about and list works by the identity, reveal related identities, display publishing patterns, and offer whatever other information of interest we can mine and display. And the works listed link to – you guessed it – WorldCat.org.

Like many projects OCLC Research has undertaken in recent years, WorldCat Identities builds on prior work by OCLC and RLG.. WorldCat identities draws inspiration from RLG’s RedLightGreen and leverages FRBR (work clustering), Audience Level (surmising audience), VIAF (linking common identities in diverse authority files), NameFinder (user-typo-tolerant searching support), Dewey Browser (DDC made visual) and makes use of SRU, a protocol that OCLC has worked with the Library of Congress and others to develop. And, of course, WorldCat – the collective work of thousands of libraries and tens of thousands of librarians – is the key data source.

Thom’s various entries on his blog, Outgoing (see this entry and later posts) and posts by Lorcan and Walt have talked about the project. Tim O'Reilly gave it a nice write up on O’Reilly Radar. And WorldCat Identities has also been mentioned by a number of other blogs (see the end of this post for links to posts I’ve found).

The attention is gratifying and confirms the generally positive reactions and excitement face-to-face demonstrations of iterations of the project have engendered when Thom has presented WorldCat Identities in various settings. We’re also delighted to be working with our RLG Programs colleagues and several RLG partner institutions to get some early, expert feedback on WorldCat Identities.

As a fallen cataloger and recovering reference librarian, I’ve been impressed with WorldCat Identities in many ways. It leverages libraries’ investments in bibliographic and authority data. Each page is just the sort of by-and-about presentation to make undergraduate-doing-a-paper-about-a-person reference transactions go much faster than helping the user assemble some version of the same on their own. And the links to related identities offer a very addicting experience for the curious – the “side streets” are many and often quite interesting. Some nice examples of pages that work well:

• Victor Hugo
• Hayao Miyazaki
• Barbara Streisand
• Peter Pan (Fictitious character)
  

But all is by no means perfect. Searching the names listed above in WorldCat Identities returns search results that show variations in how the names have been recorded in bibliographic records – some differences in form of name no doubt reflect different authoritative forms of name adopted by various communities (and VIAF offers the potential means to link multiple authoritative forms efficiently), but more than a few the variations arise from errors in the underlying data, errors that keep apart things that should be put together or alternatively put together different persons and their works as a single identity.

There are also some not-quite-as-expected-by-the-user ordering and ranking of works associated with some identities (see for example Elvis Presley), but it’s not so obvious how to “fix” many of these unexpected results (the criteria applied make logical sense for most pages) – tinkering with ranking often fixes one case only to break many, many more. And, of course, for those music lovers among us, it’s wonderful to find so many persons involved with music, but at this stage in the project, WorldCat Identities does not yet include corporate headings so no musical groups are given their own pages (and yes, you may spot a few, but they’re not really supposed to be there – these reflect a small but visible corpus of MARC tagging errors). Note that corporate identities will be added at some point – it’s a research project, after all, and we didn’t put in every feature we’d planned on day one.

So I invite you, gentle reader, to try WorldCat Identities out and let us know what you think. And if you find some especially compelling side streets, please leave a comment on this post so we can all retrace your steps.

{Posts relating to WorldCat Identities in various blogs (feel free to add more references via the comments – apologies in advance to those I might have missed): English-language: Baby Boomer Librarian, Catalogablog, DigitalKoans, Family Man Librarian, Household Opera, Library Stuff, Notional Slurry, PersonaNonData, Thinking Out Loud, Tom Keags, Vacuum, Wikimetrics ; French-language: Figoblog, affordance.info ; Italian-language: Fermo 2003 ; Japanese-language: Current Awareness Portal ; Romanian-language: ProLibro. Wikipedia articles incorporating WorldCat Identities links: Bill Clinton, Brad Pitt}

Photo: Doorways in the French Concession area of Shanghai. (c2004 Eric Childress)

Gone to Ground

I'd like to think that dozens of IAG readers have been wondering where Alane is, but I suspect--no, I am positive--that is not the case. Well, I suppose all of us, actually, have been posting infrequently and/or sporadically. I think there are several reasons for this.

One would be the obvious "we're really busy" because we really are. I think all of us have big projects we are managing or participating in as well as any number of the usual workplace busy tasks--and the latter are definitely not worth writing about.

The second is, perhaps, that the biblioblogosphere is a rich and varied place these days, full of interesting voices and writing, and increasingly, overlap in subjects addressed. In May 2004 when we began, there were far fewer people writing about library matters and things that matter to libraries which meant, quite honestly, less competition for eyeballs. We are generalists here at IAG and so appeal to all or no one. Also, when we began, we were the only OCLC staff blogging as OCLC staff and that is not so three years later. There are nine blogs* written by people who clearly or slightly less clearly work for OCLC. (And there are, of course, personal blogs written by people who work at OCLC.)

The third is....ennui? Februaryitis?

And fourth, for me, is that much of what I am reading and thinking about is related to our forthcoming report. So, while I am reading truly fascinating, thought-provoking stuff, I am loathe to share at this point as I, selfishly, want everything to be fresh when we publish the report. But, this is probably silly because not all IAG readers will read the report and it's also a really old way of thinking about writing. Chris Anderson basically wrote The Long Tail as his blog and this didn't dilute the resulting book a whit. There are other similar examples.

OK, I'll share....just not today.

Today, Ben McConnell from Church of the Customer is here at OCLC in Dublin to speak to staff and interested outsiders about his and Jackie Huba's new book, Citizen Marketers.

"A solitary citizen today with a broadband connection and a few cheap tools has a substantially better chance of influencing the public's perceptions of billion-dollar corporations than ever before. With a voice, a vote and a vocation, tens of millions of Americans are involving themselves in the cultural lives of business. The "social media" of blogs, podcasts and social networks are fusing pop culture with traditional marketing, and it's causing all manner of disruption."

Looking forward to this!



*That's not a test. They are Lorcan Dempsey's weblog, Outgoing, Weibel Lines, Hanging Together, BlogJunction, Walt at Random and Libraryman. Updated! How could I have forgotten 025.431: The Dewey Blog. Sorry, Dewey Manor dwellers!