From your 1998-99 OCLC Users' Council Delegates:
Arlene Luster Marcia Talley
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ph: 808-449-2209 ph: 410-293-6905
> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
>
> FOR MORE INFORMATION:
> Nita Dean +1-614-761-5002
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>
> RESEARCH PROJECT TO AUTOMATE CATALOGING OF INTERNET RESOURCES SEEKS
> PARTICIPANTS WORLDWIDE
>
> DUBLIN, Ohio, Sept. 28, 1998--The OCLC Office of Research is seeking
> participants for a project to explore the cooperative creation and
> sharing by libraries of metadata--data about data. The Cooperative
> Online Resource Catalog (CORC) project is designed to help both
> libraries and OCLC cope with the vast amount of material becoming
> available on the World Wide Web.
>
> Libraries, museums, archives, publishers and other institutions that
> face similar problems with the proliferation of resources on the Web
> are invited to participate. Additional information and applications
> are available via e-mail <[log in to unmask]>.
>
> "In the late 1960s, the convergence of technology and a good idea
> brought the library world into a new era of shared goals and
> resources," said Thom Hickey, chief scientist, OCLC Research and
> Special Projects. "The visionary dream of cooperative cataloging is
> now deeply embedded in library economics, and the result has been the
> most widely used academic database on the Internet, WorldCat (the OCLC
> Online Union Catalog)."
>
> "Now, libraries need a system to create and share metadata for online
> resources to help automate resource selection, creation of the
> metadata itself and maintenance of links," said Dr. Hickey."
>
> The CORC Research Project will explore the cooperative creation of a
> catalog of Internet resources. Among the goals of the project:
> producing HTML pages suitable for use on library portal sites,
> providing the ability to mix local and shared information, allowing
> easy upgrading of records, sharing and minimizing link maintenance,
> and providing automated support for metadata creation and maintenance.
>
> The project will build upon OCLC's prior activities in creating
> Internet resource databases through such projects as the OCLC NetFirst
> and InterCat databases, but the CORC project will rely more heavily on
> automated means to build its database. NetFirst, an authoritative
> directory of Internet resources, now includes more than 100,000
> records input and maintained by OCLC staff members. Started as a
> cooperative research project in 1993, InterCat contains over 45,000
> records contributed by more than 1,000 libraries. OCLC maintains
> InterCat as a proof-of-concept database and a ready resource to assist
> catalogers who are approaching the cataloging of Internet resources
> for the first time. Both NetFirst and InterCat records will be used
> initially to seed the CORC database.
>
> OCLC's pioneering work with metadata will also come into play in the
> project. Both full USMARC cataloging and an enhanced Dublin Core
> metadata mode will be used (the Dublin Core is a 15-element metadata
> set intended to facilitate discovery of electronic resources
> <http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core/>).
>
> The underlying engine of CORC, originally developed for the OCLC
> SiteSearch 4.0 software, will automatically catalog resources on the
> Web. It includes sophisticated harvesting and automated description
> capabilities developed in OCLC's Scorpion research project.
>
> OCLC Online Computer Library Center is a nonprofit, membership,
> computer library service and research organization whose computer
> network and services link more than 27,000 libraries in 64 countries
> and territories <http://www.oclc.org/>. (ND/GP)
>
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