Accept no substitutes

At the OCLC Mothership

I’m just back from two days in Dublin, Ohio in an intense learning experience about some of the many things that happen at OCLC.

I started my time there by giving a talk and answering questions (see article below or as one person summarized the summary “Részvételen alapuló digitális könyvtár – Paul Jones (az ibiblio.org igazgatója) beszédének összefoglalása, hasznos linkek és források”).

Taylor Surface, Director for Digital Content Management, and I spend some time talking about ContentDM. Mostly Taylor explaining to me all that ContentDM can and will do. Amongst the interesting capabilities is ContentDM’s use of JPG2000 — ContentDM is particularly good for image stores and is used for that at UNC for the Billy Barnes Collection.

I’m not sure how a place called Dublin settled mostly by Germans ended up with a driving range and Scottish pub, but Jay Jordan, Chip Nilges and I had a great lunch and talk in the fine May weather there.

Jasmine de Gaia and Bob Schulz and I talked about Worldcat and the inclusion of social networking and social software ideas and experiences in and around Worldcat.org Note: Worldcat includes over 1 billion items in over 10,000 libraries worldwide.


Search for an item in libraries near you:
WorldCat.org >>

Mindy Pozenel told me about the pilot tests underway with Worldcat Local.

That evening we (Jay, Eric Childress who served as my keeper and host, Tom Hickey, Michael Teets and Bill Carney) talked, ate and had good wine at an espresso-less Italian restaurant. Eric made up for the expressolessness by taking me to a Starbuck’s the next morning (thanks Eric).

The OCLC Research folks are very deep into various interesting information problems. I was doing quite a bit of running to catch up with them.

Brian Lavoie, Ralph LeVan and Jeff Young talked to me about their work in search technologies, repositories and datamining (some of what I would call analytics) including catching me up on their use of the SRU Search and Retrieve via URL protocol. Ralph and I talked about the differences and different successes of DSpace and Fedora.

Ed O’Neill and Diane Vizine-Goetz talked to me about faceted terminologies and about FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology)
. Along the way I learned of OCLC Research’s fixation on Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. There is obviously something there that I haven’t quite gotten yet, but the name does make me smile.

Over lunch a larger group of us chatted about many things including the rise of Zombies in literature. Something that would be shown to be later by Diane as and after she showed me FictionFinder: a FRBR-based prototype for fiction in WorldCat.

Thom Hickey has been working on Worldcat Identities including this one for a fairly unfamous author.

Bill Carney has a particularly interesting project in trying to identify orphan works and their possible owners and to make some guesses as to the status and various cataloged works.

[add more later]

1 Comment

  1. Paszternak

    Yepp 🙂
    I’ve read the key points of your talk at ‘Disruptive Library Technology Jester’ blog and I must say it must have been a great talk. Unfortunately I live a couple of thousand miles from there (Hungary, Europe), so I’m just… mmm… happy for it from a distance… 🙂
    Anyways, thanks for the link. The translation of my summary of the summary is

    ‘Participatory Digital Libraries – Summary of the talk of Paul Jones (Director if ibiblio.org) plus useful links and sources’.

    Adam Paszternak
    librarian

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