Our staff of research scientists and program officers engage in many activities, the core of which is the research project. Projects allow fluid teams of people to focus on defined opportunities for experimentation and other types of investigation, prototyping and advancing standards. We have organized our activities into six major themes:
The remainder of this page contains a list of all our current activities in alphabetical order.
All Current Activities
OCLC Research is developing a new, freely available discovery system for ArchiveGrid to replace the current subscription service by June 2012.
This data mining project seeks patterns in the worldwide book publishing industry, as reflective of different cultures’ literary heritage. It stems from UNESCO interest in statistical traces of cultural diversity.
This project focuses on enhancing the effective management of born-digital materials as they intersect with special collections and archives practices in research libraries.
This goal of this project is to help libraries find new ways to support their institutions' research mission.
Classify is a FRBR-based prototype designed to support the assignment of classification numbers and subject headings for books, DVDs, CDs, and other types of materials.
This work has modeled requirements for increased institutional reliance on shared print and digital repositories, based on a case study of a single consumer institution and two representative print and digital suppliers. It offers recommendations for broader adoption of interdependent collection management regimes in the cloud.
A metadata publishing tool that transfers information between databases and different formats.
This project proposes a new model that enables Virtual Reference Services (VRS) to remain viable despite today’s environment of reduced resources. It will investigate the possibility of seamless collaboration between knowledge institutions such as libraries and the Social Q&A (SQA) community.
This work seeks to establish best practice for the disposition of print journals available in electronic form – i.e. when it is most appropriate to retain print back files on campus, when to store offsite, and when to deaccession entirely.
This work aims to characterize the generic business requirements for managing physical research library collections as a shared network resource.
Browse and search collections organized by the DDC.
OCLC Research analyzed twelve final reports of library user studies from JISC, OCLC, and RIN, issued 2005-2009, and summarized the findings in a report issued under the auspices of JISC.
A short-term, JISC-funded, collaborative pilot project with the University of Oxford to investigate the theory of digital residents and visitors with students in the emerging educational stage, the time between late-stage secondary (high school) and the first year of college or university.
FAST is an enumerative faceted subject heading schema derived from the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). FAST is easier to apply and can be successfully used by non-professionals.
The FAST Converter is a Web interface for the conversion of LCSH headings to FAST headings. Either single headings or small sets of bibliographic records can be converted. The intent of this Web site is to provide a learning tool to help familiarize users with FAST and the differences between FAST and LCSH.
FictionFinder is a FRBR-based prototype that provides access to over 2.9 million bibliographic records for fiction books, eBooks, and audio materials described in OCLC WorldCat.
The “info” URI Registry was set up on behalf of NISO to identify and describe registered “info” URIs.
OCLC production units and OCLC Research are supporting the collaborative and the larger community with Linked Data-related research and standards activities, and are exploring Linked Data activities and applications.
mapFAST is a Google Maps mashup prototype designed to provide map based access to bibliographic records using FAST geographic authorities.
The goal of the Metadata Schema Transformation project is to develop a simple, web-accessible service that translates metadata records from one publicly defined format into another.
OCLC Research's NACO Normalization Service enables systems to convert names and other text strings to a format more conducive to machine comparison and sorting.
This project attempts to develop tools that advance the state of the art in extracting names from unstructured text and disambiguating them using authority files developed in the library community.
OAICat is a Java Servlet implementation of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) v2.0.
Allows museums to disclose descriptions of collection items as well as pointers to digital surrogates.
Translate a group of metadata records from one format to another.
A joint project with the OhioLINK library consortium and OhioLINK’s Collection Building Task Force, which examines bibliographic, holdings, and circulation data from Ohio college and university libraries to better understand the usage patterns of books in academic libraries.
OCLC Research participates in both the PREMIS Maintenance Activity and Editorial Committee. The Maintenance Activity is responsible for planning, organizing, and coordinating work and activities related to the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata. The PREMIS Editorial Committee has specific responsibility for managing the Data Dictionary, including supporting its use and coordinating future updates and revisions.
An experimental service to provide authority control for publisher names in bibliographic catalogs.
PURLs (Persistent Uniform Resource Locators) are Web addresses that act as permanent identifiers in the face of a dynamic and changing Web infrastructure.
An investigation into ways that libraries can support researchers' data needs and institutional needs for dataset curation.
OCLC Research will undertake a small scale experiment to explore the effectiveness of tools and techniques for bringing offline archival descriptions to the open Web.
This project includes the evaluation, sustainability, and relevance of virtual reference services, which are human-mediated, Internet-based library information services. The study of VRS users, non-users, and librarians provided a fuller understanding of their behaviors, needs, and preferences in virtual environments, in order to improve libraries' ability to respond to increased demand on libraries to provide reference services online.
SHARES is a membership-wide program of expedited, cost-saving interlibrary lending that also develops innovative new methods to improve collections sharing.
Identify the user contributions that would enrich the descriptive metadata created by libraries, archives, and museums and the issues that need to be resolved to communicate and share user contributions on the network level.
Streamlining procedures for successful delivery of rare and unique materials to users will maximize use of increasingly limited staff and financial resources.
The SRW/U Open Source project offers software that implements both the SRW Web Service and the SRU REST model interface to databases. Included are interfaces that support DSpace and Lucene implementation and OCLC's Pears database.
A collaborative project of OCLC Research and the UK's Research Information Network (RIN) to examine the use and provision of information-related tools and services to researchers throughout the lifecycle of the research process.
OCLC Research and Research Libraries UK (RLUK) will survey library special collections holdings and practices of RLUK members & OCLC Research Library Partnership institutions in the UK and Ireland.
This project provides Web-based services for controlled vocabularies.
The NDLTD Union Catalog project focuses on thesis metadata via the Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). This is a lightweight protocol for moving or sharing metadata that allows synchronization of loosely coupled databases and mandates XML Dublin Core as the default metadata format.
A joint research project of OCLC Research and the Information School, University of Sheffield to investigate the development of recommender systems for the retrieval of journals, books, digital media, video, etc. in a cloud-based multi-institution, international catalog.
The goal of this study is to identify, gather and analyse evidence of researchers’ behaviors in digital environments from a selection of recent relevant JISC-funded projects in order to derive an evidence-based picture of the researcher of today. A cooperative project of OCLC Research and JISC (UK).
View rich descriptions for books and other library materials.
Genre profiles allow users to browse genre terms for hundreds of titles, authors, subjects, characters, places, and more, ranked by popularity in WorldCat.
WorldCat Identities has a summary page for every name in WorldCat.
The WorldCat Identities Network gives users the opportunity to visually explore the interconnectivity and relationships between WorldCat Identities.
A data visualization prototype, which presents a graphical and interactive interface to three OCLC Research projects: OCLC WorldMap, OCLC Audience Level, and the Publisher Name Authority File.
Librarians' Toolbox:
