Next Generation Library Services Panel - Karen and Patti

Karen Calhoun, VP of OCLC
Martha Hruska, Chair of the UC Next Generation Technical Services Steering Tem
Patti Martin, Chair of the UC Next Generation Melvyl Steering Team and member of the NGM Exec Team.

Karen tries to clarify what Next Generation means in this context and infers that it becomes dates. Still wants to consider it as new and exciting. References Robert Young at OCLC Western spring 2009) user meetings (citation hidden by chairs from my view). Looks at the survey results from technical services people. Talks about the things that technical services practitioners wanted such. Karen wants to talk about what it is not, i.e. redundancy in collections and in services. References to Jordan, Bill and Pozenel, Mindy. 2008. Presented as a CNI Project Briefing. Slide 35. Karen talks about how once OCLC records downloaded, they are not re-uploaded once corrected, so there is a duplication of effort that should not occur. Karen puts up a visual inverted triangle that has global at the top, group in th middle, and local at the point. On the left side is: Data sharing, syndication, synchronication, linking. On the Right side: outward integration, exposure, and linking of collections (e.g. Googl books, WorldCate, Other aggregatiors, nationa libriries, consortial) with a back and forth two arrows with Local/group authantication, discovers and delivery services. All of this comes under the heading of Coordinated global, collective, and local metadat managment. The clear implication to me is that OCLC wants to be our ILS. Yet, Karen's next slide has the header "metadata swithch": Click 3 Times and You're Back in Kansas (er, UC Riverside). The idea is that you start anywhere and you end up at your library. I'm not sure how or why you would need to choose this over Google Scholar and SFX (i.e. UC-eLinks). There is also the issue to me of marc records not covered
Synchronization
Syndication
Sharing

Looking at the synchronization issues.

Next covering the user driven part of OCLC.
Reference to www.worldcat.org/oclc/311870930. This one looks at what librarians and users want.

Karen doesn't want to talk about the qualities of this report now. Not sure what she's telling us that is new.

Now talking about how the catalog is social. The "Blurring of the lines between metadat or content consumers and careators (e.g.SoundUnwound; Expert community; End user community

Looking at OCLC Expert Community Experiment
Began Feb 15
Interest and motivation from those that want to use WC as cat of record.
End User Engagement: With Thanks to John MacColl's "Are Archives . . ."
Advising that should not describe everything in detail. Start with basic description
Looks at Library of Congress experiment with images available via Flickr. Notes that the new tags were useful as well as the comments. OCLC was able to find out more about each of these topics.
Multithreaded, mashed-=up, assembled from Various Sources, Dynamic/Changing, Social. That is to say that it opens up the possibility to creat editable entries by a community of users. [There's a lot of reference to what users _might_ do to help. What does that mean for those object that people don't do anything about?]. Karen uses the example of "Bob Dylan" in SoundUnwound. This is seen as a way to implement FRBR.
OCLC FRBR Work-Set Algoritghm.
Provides a FRBR-based view of the data
Recods clustered into works using author and title fields from bibliographic records, etc. [lots of data listed lots here]
Audience as what FRBR means to a public services person. Shows example of Blade Runner in which you have a faceted tag-cloud representation. The next example was "In defense of food : an eater's manifesto". This example uses the related works section.
Karen conceives of this as opening up metadata silos.
The slides for Karen's presentation will be on SlideShare, so I'll try to do my of my thoughts.
The irony of Karen's metaphor of using our own generators v. using an electric grid is not lost on me considering how we want to move in a slighty difference direction with power (e.g. using solar cells and wind power to generate our own power).
If Karen sees the advantage of OCLC as a sharing tool to get cloud computing going, what does that really mean.
This issue concentrates on how an invisible community can do what individuals can't and how a community can do it more cheaply and more efficiently. Yet, she later puts library employees back into the picture in the next slide. So, holding out the promise of "free stuff", the discussion turns to what we do, which costs money. This is confusing because it promises something for everyone and is open to odd interpretation. I'm sure I'm not quite getting this right, so I'll have to clarify my thoughts later. I'm also not sure, of those who were asked about it, how many of those who would view content would add to it or supplement it.

Patti Martin

Starting back to BSTF recommendations (this was gone over in another assembly). This report from 2005 is still being looked at. Reminds us that users wanted worldwide pool of information, simplicity, immediate satisfaction/delivery, quality results, web 2.0 tools. I'm not sure that we done better. Confused how content delivery has been made easier (some UC-eLinks go to text, some don't. Sometimes you have to go to menus, if you know what a menu might contain. Sometimes you have to just keep clicking.). Know, from working at reference, that tools like WorldCat local that look like they are wide and deep and aren't do a lot of harm and only add opaque complexities. Has not touched on issue of records purchased by universities that we cannot share by contract agreement. Talking about why we went with OCLC. Size is the major reason (more than 140 million with 60 million from non-US libraries in the queue). I've noticed that both Holly Tomren and I are trying to Twitter this. Check #LAUC as a search. Showing the chart of Melvyl v. NGM noting that the pilot sees plenty of usage despite lack of promotion (I would dispute that based on UCI's front door, Front door real estate=promotion and other studies have shown increases in such an instance). Patti notes that OCLC and UC have had to try and be very specific and detailed because we, as an organization, have very different cultures and ways of communicating. I don't think that many of the changes being discussed regarding unique branding, etc for WorldCat will be all that great if the past is any indication. Let's find out. Patti is promising local holdings (LHRs) and is testing with Aleph, Innovative, and Voyager at three campuses. Timetable pilot is extended until our needs are met. In this economic climate, I wonder who pays for the NGM pilot when it doesn't meet its goals?
Find more at libraries.universityofcalifornia/......... Suggests subscribing to Ellen Meltzer's list (UC Users Council).