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OCLC has begun supporting demand-driven acquisition (DDA) through the WorldCat Knowledge Base. DDA pioneer and ProQuest subsidiary EBL will be the first ebook service to provide data, with sister company ebrary to follow soon. Interest in DDA is well established, but there are still challenges facing adopters of these programs.
OCLC recently launched Library Spotlight, a new, free service that uses data from the WorldCat Registry to make it easier for users to find location and contact information for libraries using the web, and includes analytics tools to help libraries examine patron traffic trends or compare their collections and services to other libraries by location, local demographics, or other criteria.
ProQuest and OCLC have announced the launch of a data exchange program that will share metadata across OCLC’s Worldcat Local, ProQuest’s Summon service, and the full text of ProQuest Central and ebrary e-books, enriching discoverability for users of each of these services.
In recent months, EBSCO Publishing has been deepening and extending partnerships with major vendors of library management systems around the world so that it can remain focused on what it considers a core competency—discovery. To that end, the company is planning in 2013 to implement ILS integrations (first announced in June 2012) with OCLC, SirsiDynix, [...]
There is great hope that these rapidly maturing discovery products will not only promote information literacy strategies but also deliver what metasearch (or federated search) has failed to achieve—a Google-like interface that provides a fast, single point of entry to an institution’s relevant and vetted scholarly content. However, at the moment, even as libraries are struggling to reestablish themselves as a compelling place to start research, the three constituencies—libraries, content providers, and discovery service vendors—cannot even agree on a common vocabulary to describe what they do.
A $4.1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will support the ongoing operations of library resource and training center WebJunction, OCLC has announced. Founded in 2002 and launched the following year with grant funding from the Gates Foundation, WebJunction’s training resources, programs, and content have since been used by staff in almost 70 percent of U.S. libraries, and have helped more than 70,000 library staff members enhance their job skills, according to OCLC.
OCLC is recommending that member institutions that would like to release their catalog data on the Web do so with the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY). The license allows users to share, copy, distribute, modify, transform and build upon a database, provided that users “attribute any public use of the database, or works produced from the database, in the manner specified in the license,” according to ODC’s simple language summary. OCLC has requested that participants making use of WorldCat-derived data conform to the norms defined in the WorldCat Rights and Responsibilities. The ODC-BY license will also be used by OCLC, as it releases additional sets of WorldCat data, including future linked data projects.
EBSCO Publishing last week announced new or expanded partnership agreements with OCLC, SirsiDynix, and Innovative Interfaces that will enhance discovery and offer easier access to many databases, e-journals and other content.
Web developers should prioritize mobile websites over desktop websites, librarians need to design more relevant instructional materials for their users, and the field of experience-based transformational development could have a major impact on the future of educational tools. These were just a few of the topics discussed during the “Top Technology Trends and LITA Awards Presentation,” session last Sunday during the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim.
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