Discussions with Karen

Question 1:
Undergraduates and consistent results from user groups?
Answer:
They weren't consistent, but they were common. In another section, there were differences among librarians and also commonalities.
Question:
How to incorporate the differences
Answer:
Through focus groups found that well suited to undergrads. More than the undergrad wants and less than what the expert user wants. There's an academic tinge to it. Wanted to emphasize the common. A lot on the delivery v. the discovery. All wanted the digital first. For the physical in nature, wanted abstracts or summaries. Convenience across every group.
Question:
What are some solutions for delivery systems? What solutions do you propose?
Answer: Valerie Horton and writes on a lot of delivery services. Experience of clicking on a link and getting to something. The message is one for libraries and what the user experience is and does it met there expectations.
Question: who does the abstracting for articles in WorldCat.
Answer: mostly from the British Library. Other sources are beyond what OCLC has but it will expose the metadata
Question: the quality control is a serious problem. One librarian gets really bad records and has to work hard to change them. Looking for quality control.
Answer: looking at national library agreements from those like that from the National Library of China (duplication of records are a serious problem). CJK matching algorithm is not great, but the idea is to attract the libraries into the system. They are in conversations with Callus and things look good.
Question: Tell us more about non-Roman cataloging
Answer: Not an expert, but subject-level expertise is growing. Most major growth is occurring outside the United States. Need to be respectful of those other standards in other countries. For subject heading schemes in other countries and languages. Will bring headings into a record and try to match OR will do an authorized duplicate record. Outside the U.S., some countries are adopting Dewey.
Question: have you found that conversations with vendors helped with getting records that would otherwise not be available to OCLC
Answer: Fastest growing segment/division in OCLC is contracts for records (e.g. Springer, Elsevier, etc.). Openly Infomatics was purchased by OCLC to basically help with stuff. [seems like it duplicates the SFX stuff or would want to replace it]
Question: Won't catalogers be less useful.
Answer: Golden opportunity for uncovering hidden collections. Thinks that normalization, etc will free up time to do more that is unique.
Question: Library Thing
Answer: LC promoting FAS approach to cataloging. OCLC has a file of FAS subject heading list and decided to create a FAS headings with authors. Karen mentions a reference to "who will tag" Karen will send the citation to Sam Dunlop.