OCLC Wise^® is our community engagement system that’s creating new connections for public libraries. Already used by more than 75% of public libraries in the Netherlands, we launched Wise in the US last year. This year we grew the pool of early adopters, signing Orange County Library System, Gwinnett County Public Library, and Anythink Libraries. Allen County Public Library, the first early adopter, went live in November 2019.

We expanded Wise in Europe. The public library of Bree in Belgium went live with Wise in January. This was the first Wise library live outside of the Netherlands. Thirty more libraries with Cultuurconnect in Flanders, the Dutch‐speaking region of Belgium, followed. This project includes these as well as all of the other 315 public libraries in Flanders, with libraries implementing the system in phases through 2021.

German development of Wise is underway with input from several leading German public libraries.

We increased the number of regions building library infrastructure on OCLC’s Syndeo®, a flexible suite of services that serves national and regional groups.

The Bibliotheksservice‐Zentrum Baden‐Württemberg (BSZ) and Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) announced the launch of a new joint initiative, K10plus. This new collaboration provides the largest catalog in Germany for scientific libraries and is being developed using Syndeo.

We partnered with Jisc to launch the first two National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK) pilot services, discovery and cataloging. The NBK supports the UK higher‐education community and connects to the global library network through WorldCat. By the end of FY19, 104 library collections were loaded.

We are exploring a partnership with the National Institute for Informatics (NII) in Japan to use the Syndeo suite of services to expand NII’s global reach while facilitating library cooperation in its region.

We published the OCLC Research report, Maple Leaves: Discovering Canada through the Published Record. The report combined information from WorldCat and Wikidata to explore Canada’s rich contribution to literature, music, films, and other creative expressions.

We marked the 40th anniversary of OCLC resource sharing by expanding our global network of resource sharing libraries and enhancing the WorldShare® Interlibrary Loan platform. We introduced our library on‐demand vision, a user‐first strategy that will enable libraries to offer an unprecedented user experience for the next 40 years.

WorldShare Interlibrary Loan was improved with patron data retention, staff notes, and resubmitting of requests. Our partnership with the National Library of New Zealand was extended with an agreement to provide more than 200 New Zealand libraries with access to WorldShare ILL. And more than 135 libraries, using the official Dutch union catalog and metadata system, transitioned to WorldShare ILL.

We implemented an open content filter and database recommender in WorldCat® Discovery. The database recommender feature simplifies user access to databases. And the new open access filter helps people quickly find and link to open content.

The increasing importance of open access resources was confirmed in our Global Council survey, detailed below.

In FY19, OCLC Global Council selected the focus area of open content and sponsored a global survey on the subject. The survey was a huge success with 705 responses from 82 countries.

OCLC Global Council delegates elected Theresa Byrd, Dean of the University Library, University of San Diego, to the OCLC Board of Trustees.

More than 800 librarians across 52 countries attended one of our three Regional Council Conferences.

Together we share ideas and experiences that dramatically expand the boundaries of librarianship and change the game for the communities we serve.

In the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany, we held Contact Day, Customer Days, Library Leaders Day, and days with consortium partners, reaching more than 700 librarians.

We attended popular conferences, such as ALA Annual and Midwinter, ACRL, the Dutch National Public Library Conference, the UKSG Annual Conference, the CILIP Library Management Systems Showcase, and Bibliothekartag, all of which provided the opportunity to reach thousands of librarians.

We hosted the third annual OCLC Resource Sharing Conference, where more than 300 attendees—from 45 US states, as well as the UK and Canada—met to learn and share creative ways to use OCLC resource sharing services.

Together, OCLC staff and member libraries grew WorldCat® to 453 million records and 2.8 billion holdings. Other partners helped grow WorldCat, too, with 364 new content collections from 29 providers. We continued to grow the WorldCat knowledge base by loading 1,583 new collections and adding ten new providers. And we partnered with East View Information Services, Springer Nature, and Knovel to automate library holding feeds, registering library collections in WorldCat and delivering WorldCat MARC records via Collection Manager.

The WorldShare® Management Services (WMS) community continued to grow. Libraries in 24 countries are now using WMS as their cloud‐based library services platform. We added more than 200 new enhancements to WMS—70% of which were based on community input.

Among the new community members:

• In North America, The Bureau de coopération interuniversitaire (BCI) selected WMS, and, McGill University, University of Winnipeg, Robert Morris University, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and the US Census Bureau went live.
• In Europe and the Middle East, new WMS members included the United Arab Emirates University, Utrecht University, and the library of AECID (Agencia Española de Cooperación para el Desarrollo). Complutense University of Madrid and the Kore University of Enna went live.
• In Australia, the Mannix Library signed an agreement to transition to WMS.

We completed the Library and Archives Canada project, a WMS implementation that included a 3.5 million bibliographic record data migration and a French translation of the Analytics/Report Designer interface. We also created new structures of Canadiana Names and Canadian Subject Authority files.

Tipasa®, the first cloud‐based interlibrary loan management system, grew to more than 240 libraries live with another 25 committed to Tipasa. The system was enhanced throughout the year with new features, including patron data retention, staff notes, and local catalog and circulation integration.

• The first Tipasa implementation outside the US was piloted at the University of Gloucestershire Library, which went live on 1 August 2018.
• All 14 members of the UKB, a consortium of the 13 Dutch university libraries and the Royal Library of the Netherlands, began using Tipasa on 28 January 2019.
• Four leading academic libraries in New Zealand implemented Tipasa: the University of Canterbury, the University of Waikato, Auckland University of Technology, and the University of Otago.

Our groundbreaking work in shared print collections accelerated. GreenGlass®, a web application that allows single libraries to visualize their collections in collective collections, grew globally, as we signed 42 new or extended contracts with institutions such as Minitex, Libraries and Archives Canada, and the Michigan Shared Print Initiative.

In partnership with the Center for Research Libraries, we are developing a registry in WorldCat for library retention commitments for print serials using a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, which was awarded in June 2018. This effort will continue through FY20.

Working with 16 institutions, we completed a linked data Wikibase prototype, built to view, edit, and create linked data descriptions and relationships, and to reconcile data between legacy bibliographic information and linked data entities. We published Analysis of 2018 International Linked Data Survey for Implementers to share information about projects or services that format metadata as linked data or make subsequent uses of it.

With Ithaka S+R, we published University Futures, Library Futures: Aligning library strategies with institutional directions, which establishes a new framework for understanding the fit between emerging library service paradigms and university types.

With euroCRIS, the international organization for research information, we published Practices and Patterns in Research Information Management: Findings from a Global Survey. This report examines how research institutions worldwide are applying research information management (RIM) practices and how libraries are becoming leaders in this important area.

The Library 100: Top Novels of All Time is a list of the novels most widely available in libraries today. Using WorldCat, the world’s largest database of library materials, we’ve identified these novels. And while this list recognizes important literature, it also celebrates libraries and their vital role in society.

We were awarded grants from IMLS and the Wikimedia Foundation to:

• Help public libraries respond to the opioid epidemic
• Expand the Small Libraries Create Smart Spaces project and select a second group of 15 small and rural public libraries to participate
• Investigate expanding our Wikipedia + Libraries Training to Mexico

Photo courtesy Hot Springs Library

We hosted a three‐part webinar series on using library assessment to evaluate and share library impact. The new series brought together research and practice on creating assessments that provide useful, actionable data to show the critical role libraries play in their communities.

We launched a new self‐paced WebJunction® course that teaches libraries how to “supercharge” story time. The new course applies research‐based practices to boost early literacy in young children.

Equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) were the focus of this past year’s OCLC Distinguished Seminar Series. Discussions addressed issues of EDI in librarianship and information technology. Hundreds of people attended these presentations, and thousands more viewed the event recordings.