Highlights from OCLC Western Director's Day 2007 : Part 2

Here is part two of my report on the OCLC Western Director's Day event.

OCLC President Jay Jordan discussed WorldCat Local, and said they had all the beta sites they needed, thank-you-very-much. I got the impression he's getting offers from a lot of libraries who want to be in on this. So far, the betas are involving extensive (and probably time-consuming) customization. They seem to be moving forward as aggressively as they can.

George Needham, OCLC Vice President Member Services, spoke about library trends, including the move to patron self-service, user-centered services, even design trends to make libraries seem more friendly and inviting.

The most notable thing he said was that according to studies, for information-seekers "convenience trumps quality". Patrons will choose easily accessible but mediocre data over high-quality data that's hard to get to.

Finally, Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC VP for Research, presented on OCLC's response to the changing information environment we find ourselves in. His presentation slideshow is online here.

He believes that libraries must adapt to patron habits and make our services convenient, because in today's world, time is scarce and information abundant. Brand recognition is increasingly important as patrons try to navigate this environment, and OCLC sees an opportunity to help libraries collectively build a brand to at least get a place on a map dominated by the Googles and Amazons of the world. To compete, our brand must be "web scale", and OCLC sees it's role as helping to stitch us together to help make one.

OCLC sees other business opportunities in creating system-wide efficiencies through integrated management services to libraries in various ways.

Finally, he briefly discussed the "WorldCat Grid", which will be a platform to open up OCLC systems as web services.

WorldCat Local Goes Live!

WorldCat Local, OCLC's entry in the OPAC 2.0 sweepstakes has made its debut (public beta, anyway) at the University of Washington.

Basically, this is a scoped look at WorldCat which uses OCLC's bibliographic records and holdings data and links to a local circulation system for item status information. It thus takes the place of a traditional, locally-hosted OPAC, but it can offer many of the new features libraries now want in OPACS but often can't get from legacy vendors because of the complexity of the old systems.

It's interesting to see how the branding and page links blend in with the rest of the UW's web site. The faceting, links to other libraries, and the ability to directly request an item all are improvements over many of the OPAC 1.0 installs out there.

It's also interesting to observe that it handles non-inverted names like "John Smith" (as opposed to "Smith, John"), which like using a slide rule or sharpening a quill pen, does not seem like a skill much in evidence among today's students.