March 2018 OLAC Newsletter

Metadata Working Group to develop recommendations for descriptive metadata. Their approach is tailored to the unique characteristics of archived websites, with an eye to helping institutions improve the consistency and efficiency of their metadata practices in this emerging area. The working group recognized the importance of gaining a clear understanding of the needs of users of archived web content, and took this into account throughout the project. The work was done in consultation with the International Internet Preservation Consortium, the Society of American Archivists Web Archiving Section, and the Internet Archive's Archive-It program, and with much community input and feedback. The result of this community collaboration is three new publications that cover recommendations to help institutions improve the consistency and efficiency of their metadata practices, a literature review of user needs, and a review of web harvesting tools: Descriptive Metadata for Web Archiving: Recommendations of the OCLC Research Library Partnership Web Archiving Metadata Working Group; Descriptive Metadata of Web Archiving: Literature Review of User Needs; and Descriptive Metadata of Archiving: Review of Harvesting Tools.

An Exploration of the Irish Presence in the Published Record A country projects its culture in many ways, but few equal the importance of published materials. As the published materials linked to a country accumulate over time, a national presence of sorts forms and expands within the published record—a corpus of publications associated with that country and its people. With the aid of library collections data, a national presence can be separated out of the broader published record for study, to gain a better understanding of a country’s contributions and influence in literature, scholarship, and ideas.

The published record in all its manifold expressions is scattered across a vast global network of libraries. Computational analysis of the Irish presence—or any national presence—is made possible by bibliographic and holdings data produced by libraries, and in particular, by the massive aggregation of this data in the WorldCat database. WorldCat is the world’s most comprehensive database of information about library collections, registering the holdings of more than 16,000 libraries around the globe. This massive aggregation of metadata is the best approximation available of the published record, as well as a unique source of intelligence about world literature as it is collected and stewarded in library collections. The Irish presence can be circumscribed and lifted out of this library data–driven view of the published record, and explored as a distinct collection of materials. An Exploration of the Irish Presence in the Published Record, by Brian Lavoie and Lorcan Dempsey analyzes this data and reveals how the Irish presence is known and perceived throughout the world.

Toward a New Understanding of American Higher Education Institutions OCLC Research is excited to be working with colleagues at Ithaka S+R on a new project examining the impact of increased institutional differentiation in universities on the organization of academic libraries and the services they provide. The “University Futures, Library Futures” project is generously supported by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation. Read a 61 | P a g e