OCLC Research Podcasts and Webinars

Webinar speakers addressed a variety of issues and scenarios such as outsourcing to a computer history museum, a commercial service, or another archives; transferring from outmoded tapes and e-mail systems; providing services within a consortium; and good-enough in-house solutions.

In this webinar, Senior Research Scientist Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Ph.D., and Associate Research Scientist Ixchel Faniel, Ph.D., present an overview of their report, Reordering Ranganathan: Shifting User Behaviors, Shifting Priorities, in which they suggest how a reordering and a reinterpretation of each of Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science can be applied to today's world.

Wikipedia seeks libraries who are willing to host a Wikipedia editor and give that editor access to their library materials in order to enhance the article citation process on Wikipedia. The cooperative's goal for this project is to make the library's e-collections available online via the WorldCat Knowledge Base, so that students and others on campus can see links in Wikipedia to full-text articles that the library makes available. This webinar was a follow on from a small discussion at ALA Midwinter, and Senior Program Officer Merrilee Proffitt and Partner Programs Director Cindy Cunningham hope to broaden the conversation, help library staff find out more and how their institutions can play a role.

The webinar features demonstrations of two tools, xEAC and RAMP, that will help archivists and librarians explore new possibilities for name authority work, moving beyond the boundaries of traditional archival metadata.

This webinar provides information about the changes institutions can make to their Encoded Archival Description (EAD) practices to improve the discoverability of their materials.

This webinar provides an overview of how the international sharing partnership SHARES expands and enhances local collections with materials owned by OCLC Research Library Partners around the world.

In this webinar, Dr. Lynn Silipigni Connaway will discuss results of multiple user behavior studies and recommendations for promoting user engagement with library services, sources, and systems.

In this webinar, Dr. Charles Kurzman, Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will present his research on changing academic attention to world regions over the past 50 years, "attention" as measured by analyzing works published about each region of the world and collected in U.S. academic libraries for each year of publication since 1958. The patterns that emerge from this research will help to inform social scientists and educational policymakers about trends and possible gaps in scholarly attention to different regions of the world.

This webinar will provide an overview of ArchiveGrid, a collection of nearly two million archival material descriptions that is now freely available from OCLC Research, as well as related work.

This webinar will provide examples of how some of your colleagues are managing research data--the raw output of research investigations, not the resulting reports--including the context in which they are handling their goals, current activities and plans, as well as demonstrations of the systems they are developing.

In this webinar, OCLC Research Consulting Project Manager Eric Childress provides an overview of OCLC Research as well as findings from recent reports.

In this webinar, Program Officer Constance Malpas and Research Scientist Brian Lavoie present findings from their report, Print Management at "Mega-scale": a Regional Perspective on Print Book Collections in North America. The report provides insight into the characteristics of a network of regionally consolidated print collections, key relationships across these collections, and their implications for system-wide issues such as information access, mass digitization, resource sharing, and preservation of library resources.

In this webinar, OCLC Research Library Partnership Vice President Jim Michalko shares a synthesis of the priorities and trends affecting US research libraries in the twenty-first century, the directions they are taking, and the ways in which OCLC Research seeks to respond to these concerns and advance the desired directions.

In this webinar Jonathan Rochkind demonstrated how Umlaut allows you to de-couple your "link resolver" user-facing UI from your underlying knowledge base products..

In this webinar, OCLC Research Wikipedian in Residence Max Klein discussed what's happened between Wikipedia and libraries in the past and what it means for the future.

In this webinar, five members of the Social Metadata Working Group presented highlights of their research and personal observations: observations on our research into social metadata, tagging, crowd-sourcing, and other uses of social metadata, LAMs' use of third-party sites, key points from our survey, measuring successful use of social metadata.

In this webinar, Kenning Arlitsch and Patrick OBrien provided an overview of their research and recommendations on how to improve the indexing ratios of institutional repositories in Google Scholar, including transforming metadata to Google Scholar-preferred schemas, based on what they accomplished with USpace.

In this wide-ranging and optimistic interview, Professor Lankes challenges us to raise our expectations--of ourselves, our colleagues, and of our institutions--to better serve our communities. He describes how fostering an environment where risk-taking and expectation of occasional failure (as opposed to mistakes) can better enable us to meet our challenges. He urges us to engage in lively conversations with the communities we serve and imagine what we could be instead of what we were. And of course he says this in a much more engaging, interesting, and eloquent way than this pitiful summary can depict. Listen and be inspired.

In this interactive WebEx session, five OCLC Research Library Partner staff did a "show and tell" to demonstrate their uses of VIAF: Using VIAF as the primary reference for LC/NACO authority work to differentiate names--Spencer Anspach, Indiana University; Using VIAF to create a record in Fihrist, a multi-institutional Islamic manuscript catalog, incorporating the URI to an author's VIAF page--Alasdair Watson, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; How VIAF helps researchers--Magda El-Sherbini, Ohio State University; Using VIAF to identify provenance of rare books and adding VIAF links to images of bookplates, inscriptions and other marks of ownership in Flickr--Regan Kladstrup, University of Pennsylvania; Using VIAF to identify issues in the VIAF matching process and how to respond and report them--Stephen Hearn, University of Minnesota.

In this webinar, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist at OCLC, and Marie L. Radford, Ph.D., Associate Professor, School of Communication & Information, Rutgers, discussed the key findings of their multi-year study that were recently published in the report, Seeking Synchronicity: Revelations and Recommendations for Virtual Reference. These findings indicate that today's students, scholars and citizens are not just looking to libraries for answers to specific questions--they want partners and guides in a lifelong information-seeking journey. By transforming virtual reference (VR) services into relationship-building opportunities, libraries can leverage the positive feelings people have for libraries in a crowded online space where the biggest players often don't have the unique experience and specific strengths that librarians offer.

In this short and lively webinar, Bruce Washburn and research assistant Ellen Ast provided an overview of ArchiveGrid's history along with a demonstration of its new beta discovery system in development in OCLC Research. They also reviewed the processes behind the growth of the new ArchiveGrid system and talked about future research and development plans, including the goals to promote it both as a sought-after information resource and as a model for archival discovery practices.

In this webinar, experts from special collections and archives offered up creative ways to speed up other parts of the process to provide greater access to special collections, including: nimble workflows that allow multiple streams of manuscript content to be scanned and presented online quickly; re-using archival description, or: our metadata is only as good as our descriptive practice; the quick and the good: outsourcing rapid capture of special collections; a planned destructive scanning process designed to create digitally reformatted copies that join their born-digital counterparts and are accessed and preserved as a single format; a system, paired with rapid capture, to provide access to entire folder content through the finding aid.

This webinar was all about sharing streamlined methods for scanning and delivering digital copies of special collections materials at the request of users. This webinar featured creative experiments aimed at scanning and delivering user-requested digital copies of special collections materials. San Diego State University offers self-serve scanning in their reading room. At the University of Chicago, special collections and interlibrary loan (ILL) colleagues are working together to use existing infrastructure and expertise. The Getty Research Institute developed a tiered approach to capture and post digital files created by fulfilling user requests. Speakers discussed workflows-in-progress, lessons learned, and how they learned to stop worrying and love digital copy requests.

This webinar covered a variety of communications vehicles Partners can use to receive information about the OCLC Research Library Partnership, as well as ways they can access outputs that showcase the progress of our work, such as reports, webinars and presentations. Also included were ways Partners can take advantage of the many benefits of Partnership, the types of opportunities they can engage in, and the different ways in which they can contribute to the Partnership.

In this follow up to the well-attended TAI CHI HTML5 and CSS3 webinar on 8 March, author and Web design specialist Christopher Schmitt continued the discussion with a more in-depth look at how CSS3 is being used to improve the design, layout, and functionality of modern Web sites. The advent of CSS3 allows for greater control and creativity in Web design. Attendees in this workshop learned about using colors through RGBa and opacity, border images, text and box shadows, animations, transformations, and more.

In this webinar, Stephen Abrams, Patricia Cruse, John Kunze and Perry Willett from UC3 provide background on the micro-services concept and the growing community of practice that is cohering around the idea, and a technical description and demonstration of the Merritt repository and its services. The repository supports flexible, low-barrier submission via human interfaces and machine APIs; persistent identifier minting, binding, and resolution; a semantically-enabled metadata catalog; and distributed storage sub-domains to facilitate wide-scale replication. Merritt is being used by UC3 to manage the diverse digital collections of the ten campus University of California system and a number of external content partners. It provides contributors and curators with direct control over their content and access to it; facilitates content sharing and reuse; and helps meet the requirements for data sustainability increasingly being required by grant funding agencies. Merritt will soon be made available under an open source license.

In this webinar, Program Officer Jackie Dooley provides an overview of the project in which 275 institutions across the U.S. and Canada were surveyed to determine norms across the community and to provide data to support decision-making and priority setting. She also holds an open discussion about the implications of the survey results for the special collections and archives community, as well as major outcomes and recommended action items from the report, Taking Our Pulse: The OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives in Academic and Research Libraries.

In this webinar, Sarah L. Shreeves, IDEALS and Scholarly Commons Coordinator from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign gives an overview of BibApp, an open source software that matches researchers on your campus with their publication data and mines that data to see collaborations and to find experts in research areas. Sarah explains explains how BibApp works, reviews the challenges of work in this area, and highlights the next steps for the BibApp development team.

In this webinar, Program Officer Constance Malpas and a panel of young library leaders discuss the role of data analysis in library collection management and provide examples of how they're putting aggregated library data to work in their daily operations. Staff from three RLG Partner institutions share insights from research that is reshaping preservation, access and management practices at Columbia University, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Los Angeles.

In this webinar, OCLC Research Post-Doctoral Researcher Timothy J. Dickey provides an overview of an OCLC Research data mining project that looked at books as expressions of global cultural diversity to provide a global overview of the publishing arts. In this project, researchers considered the overall annual publishing for every country of the world, the libraries that collect and even import a country's works, the "foreign" monographs their libraries import, and the proportion of publications in various official and native languages. These efforts produced a rich data portrait of the global literary arts (as reflected library records in the WorldCat database), with emphasis on cultural literary heritage by country and region and includes a wealth of case studies in single countries' practices in both literary publishing and the preservation of their literary heritage.

In this podcast, noted library author and "provocateur" Dorothea Salo discusses how libraries license e-content and why collective action by libraries and library consortia is needed to change how licensing currently happens.

In this webinar, OCLC developer network product manager Karen Coombs will provide an overview of the Web services offered by OCLC and demonstrate real world applications of these Web services in libraries. Come learn about services such as the WorldCat Search API, xISBN, WorldCat Registry and Identities.

OCLC Senior Research Scientist Ralph LeVan dives deeper beneath the surface to describe the open source technologies he uses to expose records in text databases as Linked Data. He also talks about Java, Servlet Filters, XSLT, and SRU, plus explains how anyone can use his framework to make their database content available as Linked Data.

To make the RLG Partnership available beyond ALA attendees, we once again held the RLG Partnership Update Session before ALA as virtual meeting via WebEx. In the webinar, OCLC Research program officers and research scientists gave reports on relevant projects recently completed or underway to enable RLG Parnters to learn about our current work and discover ways to become more engaged in the RLG Partnership.

In this webinar, OCLC Research program officer Karen Smith-Yoshiumura provided a recap of an RLG Partners working group's findings from gathering and analyzing evidence over the past two years about MARC tag usage to inform library metadata practices. She expanded on their conclusion that MARC data cannot continue to exist in its own discrete environment and will need to be leveraged and used in other domains to reach users in their own networked environments. The discussion focused on the next steps to transition beyond MARC and have our metadata part of the semantic Web. This webinar was one of three amplified sessions that were livecast from the 2010 Annual RLG Partnership Meeting. Please note: there was a problem with the audio recording at the beginning of this webinar, so several minutes pass before the speaker can be heard.

In this webinar, Dennis Massie and Jennifer Schaffner from OCLC Research, as well as Paul Contstantine from University of Washington and Jon Shaw from University of Pennsylvania, provided an overview of how two RLG Partnership working groups are modeling sustainable workflows for delivery of special collections via "digitization on demand" and interlibrary sharing. They also engaged the audience in a discussion about the radical rift among experienced professionals about whether sharing special collections is even a good idea. (The four speakers definitely think it IS a good idea.) This webinar was one of three amplified sessions that were livecast from the 2010 Annual RLG Partnership Meeting.

In this webinar, OCLC Research RLG Partnership European Director John MacColl provided an overview of a new activity related to data curation that OCLC Research recently kicked off in support of the RLG Partnership, focusing on a joint OCLC Research-LIBER series of case studies in data curation needs in the humanities and social sciences in a range of university libraries in Europe, Australia and North America. He also requested input from RLG Partners on this project, and on data curation roles for libraries in general, throughout the presentation. This webinar was one of three amplified sessions that were livecast from the 2010 Annual RLG Partnership Meeting.

In this webinar, OCLC Senior Research Scientist Ralph LeVan explains what Linked Data is about and how OCLC produces it, using examples from VIAF (The Virtual International Authority File). He also talks about topics such as Real World Objects, Generic Documents, Content Negotiation and RDF.

In this webinar, OCLC Research Scientist Brian Lavoie talks about the economic challenges of long-term digital preservation, based on the work of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, which he co-chaired.

In this webinar, presenters give an overview of the free MissingMaterials.org process that shares reliable information about missing rare books and other materials at the network level to help identify stolen materials, recover missing items and deter future crimes.

In this webinar, Dennis Massie, OCLC Research program officer and author of the report, Greening Interlibrary Loan Practices, discusses a study of current resource sharing practices recently undertaken by a team of environmental impact consultants and discloses key recommendations and best practices.

Learn more about current conditions in the mobile application development landscape, choices to be made between "native" and Web mobile application development paths, look at some recent efforts, and consider the impact mobile apps might have now and in the near term.

In this webinar, four presenters who have implemented Single Search at each of their institutions discussed emerging practices in the local aggregation of library, archive and museum collections, with a particular emphasis on successful strategies and dead ends.

In this webinar, some of the authors of the recently published report, Implications of MARC Tag Usage on Library Metadata Practices, present evidence gathered and analyzed by the RLG Partnership MARC Tag Usage Working Group to inform library metadata practices, with a focus on machine applications. Please note: there was a problem with the audio recording at the beginning of this webinar, so several minutes pass before the speaker can be heard.

In this webinar, author and Web design specialist Christopher Schmitt reveals what attendees need to re-learn about markup, to understand how to incorporate new HTML5 elements and to embrace the new creative freedoms of new Web typography and CSS3. These two new Web development technologies are revolutionizing the Web development and design worlds. HTML5 is the latest version of the HTML standard, offering easy ways to add semantic markup and application-like features such as video without proprietary plug-ins, drag-and-drop, offline data storage, and more. CSS3 extends earlier Cascading Style Sheet standards for managing layout, colors, etc., with new features designed to optimize HTML5 Web content.

In this recorded meeting on 11 March, copyright experts, practitioners and staff from OCLC Research agreed on what is a reasonable approach to rights when making digitized collections of unpublished materials accessible via the Web.

In this recorded meeting on 11 March, copyright experts, practitioners and staff from OCLC Research agreed on what is a reasonable approach to rights when making digitized collections of unpublished materials accessible via the Web.

In this recorded meeting on 11 March, copyright experts, practitioners and staff from OCLC Research agreed on what is a reasonable approach to rights when making digitized collections of unpublished materials accessible via the Web.

In this webinar, authors of the report, Over, Under, Around, and Through: Getting Around Barriers to EAD Implementation, discuss EAD's value as a key element of successful archival information systems, as well as ways to help overcome potential barriers to its implementation.

In this webinar, OCLC Research program officers and research scientists and program officers give reports on relevant projects recently completed or underway.

Learn more about Omeka, a free and open source collections-based, Web-based publishing platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, educators and cultural enthusiasts.