Action for Libraries
OCLC Members Council Report
By Jamie LaRue, Director
Douglas County Libraries, Colorado
Jamie LaRue is one of three BCR delegates to OCLC Members Council and will be contributing a regular column reporting on Members Council activities. Each delegate is elected for a three-year term. BCR's number of delegates for each region is based on our member libraries contribution to the WorldCat bibliographic database and our number of OCLC-member institutions. Other BCR representatives are: Claudia Thornton Frazier, Digital Initiatives Coordinator, Librarian, Cowles Library, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa; and Sheryl Taylor, Director of Library Services, John & Louise Hulst Library, Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa.
What is OCLC Members Council and What Does It Mean to You?
You all know about OCLC and may have made your first connection to BCR because of it. While BCR is the oldest of the so-called "networks" in the United States (my suggestion for a motto: "Here first. Still first."), many librarians first hook up with a network as a broker of OCLC cataloging and ILL services. Even today, OCLC accounts for about a third of BCR's activity.
OCLC is the world's largest library cooperative. In recent years, it has gone from a mostly United States-focused entity to a company with a truly global reach.
Members Council is a group of 66 delegates, elected from the U.S. regional networks and OCLC's U.S. and international service centers "to provide strategic direction and guidance to the OCLC Board and management in the planning, delivery and evaluation of its global services."
What does that mean? It means that three times a year - typically October, February and May, the delegates are flown to Dublin (Ohio, alas, not Ireland), where they are put up in the Marriott there for at least two and a half days of meetings.
The meetings typically consist of at least four levels of activity:
- Presentations by OCLC management about the performance of OCLC the company and professional research.
- Presentations by OCLC staff about products under consideration or active development.
- Presentations by OCLC Members and networks about other issues related to professional trends, with an increasingly international outlook.
- Networking and discussions among the delegates as they react to or advise each other and OCLC representatives about where librarianship is or should be headed.
Members Council also elects a couple of representatives to the governing board itself, most recently, our own Maggie Farrell (Dean of Libraries at the University of Wyoming in Laramie) and Bruce Newell (retired from the Montana State Library).
I am nearing the end of my first three-year term as a delegate. This year, I am also serving both on the Nominating Committee (which prepares a slate of candidates for various Members Council offices) and on the Executive Committee - three delegates elected by the Members Council at-large to assist the Members Council president plan agendas for the three annual meetings.
These meetings are rich both in human dynamics and professional development. At the request of BCR's executive director, Brenda Bailey-Hainer, I'm going to try to give some brief reports, from time to time, about what's happening at Members Council.
Governance: International Growth
As mentioned above, OCLC - particularly through its acquisition of European ILS vendor PICA - is now truly international in scope. In addition, OCLC is working with a host of national libraries across the globe to build up a WorldCat that really is the catalog of the planet's intellectual content. Most of the growth over the past two years in WorldCat's holdings has come from international batchloads, a trend that is likely to continue.
At present, however, there are (if memory serves) 10 international delegates at Members Council and just one on OCLC's 15-member governing board. Recent meetings have focused on the need to rise above a North American-centric perspective and perhaps restructure the whole process through which Members Council delegates and board members are chosen. A report is underway, hired out to a consultant firm based in England. We expect to see a preliminary report in February.
Networks: Issues and Reports of Interest
Another couple of reports, distributed and discussed at the October meeting, indicated that the longstanding relationship of networks to OCLC- a "distribution chain" that does not exist elsewhere in the world - has some problems. It's a complex story; suffice it to say that BCR is well-positioned for this time of change.
Although both of these issues may be expected to be of little interest to the typical OCLC user, what may be of more interest was October's presentation by Karen Calhoun, OCLC vice-president of WorldCat and Metadata Services. Calhoun presented a fascinating overview of TS practice and evolution. She reported, wryly, that the vast majority of cataloging records edited in OCLC do nothing to improve access to works; they are "cosmetic" in nature (adding spaces, commas, semi-colons, etc.) The technical term for this is "unproductive dinking around." She also spoke at length about a recent, and controversial, partnership with Baker and Taylor to batch load records at the point of early ordering. The theory was that this would provide good quality OCLC records much earlier in the acquisition process. As a result of several "challenges and problems," frankly admitted, we wound up with a lot of sparse and poor records, not to mention a lot of unhappy catalogers. The problems are being addressed with the merging of duplicates, a concerted effort with Baker and Taylor to clean up the process and a push for better communication with catalogers and library managers. Those who attempt nothing make no mistakes. I think OCLC learned a lot from this, and the future clearly does lie with improved batch loading.
Also of note: a Members Council task force just finished a draft on the use of e-books in libraries, not yet generally available, but coming soon.
Finally, OCLC released "Sharing Privacy and Trust in our Networked World," a study of the Internet use by teenagers around the world. This marks yet another example of the "thought leadership" that OCLC demonstrates. It's worth a look.
Is there something you'd like to know about OCLC's direction? Don't hesitate to contact me or one of our other BCR Members Council delegates. (See www.bcr.org/membership/mc/mcdir.html for the whole list).