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:
A special ResearchWorks page brings together activities from across all themes that have prototypes or hands-on demonstrations for you to try out. Similarly, the Software page brings together all activities which provide tools you can download for local use. Finally, we know there may still be some interest in activities that have concluded, so those are available on our Past Activities page.
The remainder of this page contains a list of all our current activities in alphabetical order.
All Current Activities
ArchiveGrid is a growing collection of nearly two million archival material descriptions that provides a foundation for OCLC Research collaboration and interactions with the archival community, and also serves as the basis for our experimentation and testing in text mining, data analysis, and discovery system applications and interfaces.
A Web interface for FAST Subject selection, assignFAST explores automating the manual selection of the Authorized and Use For headings based on autosuggest technology.
Changes in Scholarly Communication
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.
Cloud Library: Cloud-sourcing Shared Research Collections
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.
Define Policy and Infrastructure Requirements for Building and Managing Shared Print Collections
This work aims to characterize the generic business requirements for managing physical research library collections as a shared network resource.
This project focuses on enhancing the effective management of born-digital materials as they intersect with special collections and archives practices in research libraries.
Browse and search collections organized by the DDC.
Digital Information Seeker Report
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.
Digital Visitors and Residents: What Motivates Engagement with the Digital Information Environment?
A JISC-funded collaboration with the University of Oxford to investigate the theory of digital residents and visitors among learners in four educational stages, from late-stage secondary (high school) into post-degree professional practice.
This collaborative initiative aims to pilot the use of existing and newly developed OCLC Research methods and techniques for cleansing and enriching large aggregations of metadata to identify and create semantic links between heterogeneous objects that are connected.
FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology)
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: A FRBR-based Prototype for Fiction in WorldCat
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.
Kindred Works is a demonstration interface built upon an experimental content-based recommender service. Various characteristics associated with a sample resource, such as classification numbers, subject headings, and genre terms, are matched to WorldCat to provide a list of recommendations.
mapFAST is a Google Maps mashup prototype designed to provide map based access to bibliographic records using FAST geographic authorities.
This project will study the use of MARC tags and subfields in WorldCat and produce reports to inform decisions about where we go from here.
Metadata Schema Transformation Services
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.
Allows museums to disclose descriptions of collection items as well as pointers to digital surrogates.
Allows museums to disclose descriptions of collection items as well as pointers to digital surrogates.
OCLC Crosswalk Web Service Demo
Translate a group of metadata records from one format to another.
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.
OhioLINK Collection and Circulation Analysis
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.
PREMIS Maintenance Activity and Editorial Committee
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.
OCLC Research and the Open Planets Foundation (OPF) are conducting a Preservation Health Check pilot from July 2012 to July 2013 to analyze the quality of preservation metadata created and in use by operational repository and deposit systems and evaluate the potential of such metadata for assessing digital preservation risks.
Print Management at "Mega-scale": a Regional Perspective on Print Book Collections in North America
This work provides a deep understanding of what regionally-consolidated print collections would look like if they came to pass, as what the implications would be for system-wide issues such as mass digitization, resource sharing, and preservation.
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.
Registering Researchers in Authority Files
The Registering Researchers Task Force aims to create a concise report summarizing the benefits and trade-offs of emerging approaches to the problem of incomplete national authority files.
Role of Libraries in Data Curation
An investigation into ways that libraries can support researchers' data needs and institutional needs for dataset curation.
Rough and Ready: Typescript Finding Aid Conversion
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.
Sharing and Aggregating Social Metadata
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.
Support for Research Workflows
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.
Survey of Special Collections and Archives in the UK and Ireland
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.
Survey of Special Collections and Archives in the US and Canada
A detailed survey of more than 300 special collections and archives in academic and research libraries throughout the United States and Canada identified norms across the community as well as defined needs for community action and further research.
This project provides Web-based services for controlled vocabularies.
User-Centered Design of a Recommender System for a "Universal" Library Catalogue
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.
Virtual Research Environment (VRE) Study
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.
The WorldCat Identities Network gives users the opportunity to visually explore the interconnectivity and relationships between WorldCat Identities.
The WorldCat Identities Network gives users the opportunity to visually explore the interconnectivity and relationships between WorldCat Identities.
Some of the activities listed here have prototypes or demonstrations you can explore and play with. You can find a list of just those hands-on activities in ResearchWorks.
A few of these activities have generated software that you can download and build upon. Go to our software page for a list of only those activities.
The OCLC Research Library Partnership has sponsored the activities with this mark.