Research Collections and Support

ArchiveGrid is a collection of over seven million archival material descriptions, including MARC records from WorldCat and finding aids harvested from the web. It is supported by OCLC Research as the basis for our experimentation and testing in text mining, data analysis, and discovery system applications and interfaces, and it provides a foundation for our collaboration and interactions with the archival community.

This project focuses on enhancing the effective management of born-digital materials as they intersect with special collections and archives practices in research libraries.

To help address issues around making special collections digitally accessible, OCLC Research has produced a number of reports that challenge the library and archival community to reexamine practices. This body of work, which includes white papers and how-to guides that detail best practices, helps practitioners and managers make collections more accessible in a digital age.

Examines how academic libraries collaborate with other campus units to support institutional priorities in the research enterprise and explores strategies for communicating the research library’s value proposition.

The project explored relevant academic literatures such as economics, political science, and organizational theory to see what they have to say about the factors that figure most prominently in the

Research data management (RDM) is assuming an increasingly prominent place in scholarly communication, funder requirements, codes of academic practice, university research strategy, and even national policy.

This project seeks to demystify RIM practices in the United States by offering a more comprehensive and strategic view of the practices, stakeholders, and infrastructures,

Research information management systems (RIMS) support the transparent aggregation, curation, and utilization of data about institutional research activities. Globally, the RIM ecosystem is quite mature in locales with national requirements to collect and report the outputs of institutional research.

The Secret Life of Data (SLO-data) project will improve the quality of information collected during archaeological excavations across the globe, preserve this information, and share it with the public. Outcomes include exemplary open datasets, an expansion of Open Context’s data publishing services, and online educational modules.

Research universities must overcome internal silos to support research workflows and stay competitive. Effective collaboration, or social interoperability, helps connect individuals and units like libraries, fostering mutual understanding and consensus. This approach strengthens research support services, including data management and ORCID adoption.

This OCLC Research Library Partnership activity examined shifts in scholarly communication, moving from a journal-centric model to alternatives like open-access repositories. It also explored increasing cross-institutional collaborations and scholars' growing use of social media.

Research libraries are repositioning special collections and archives, but require an evidence base to help them make decisions about where and how to invest. Because these materials require specialized approaches to management, cataloging, preservation and access, enormous challenges abound.

The PREMIS Data Dictionary, first released in 2005 by the PREMIS Working Group, is the leading standard for preservation metadata, guiding the creation, management, and use of metadata in digital preservation. Maintained by the Library of Congress, the PREMIS Maintenance Activity provides a central hub for the Data Dictionary, XML schemas, and related resources. An Editorial Committee oversees updates, user support, and research coordination to ensure the ongoing development and adoption of PREMIS standards.

OCLC Research and the Open Planets Foundation (OPF) are conducting a Preservation Health Check pilot 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.

The Registering Researchers Task Group aims to create a concise report that summarizes the benefits and trade-offs of emerging approaches to the problem of incomplete national authority files.

The OCLC Research Partners Task Group on Representing Organizations in ISNI is charged to document how organizations should be represented in the ISNI database. The task group's goal is to advise the OCLC ISNI team in Leiden on ways to improve ISNI record quality, encoding, completeness, user interface, diffusion and to help better engage the community.

Academic libraries are increasingly expected to play a role in data curation, supporting the requirements of both the university and its researchers. Since there is seldom additional funding for this additional activity, we are involved in a variety of projects to explore low-barrier, meaningful ways in which libraries can begin to manage research datasets.

OCLC Research conducted a small scale experiment to explore the effectiveness of tools and techniques for bringing offline descriptions to the open Web.

Rare and unique research collections are distributed system-wide, and any given institution's scholars and students may discover collections in other libraries and archives that are essential for their work. Fewer people are able to travel to use collections, while research using primary resources has steadily increased.

Archives and special collections hold huge numbers of analog and physical digital audiovisual (A/V) media, many of which are unique and/or of high research value. Changes in scholarship have led to an increased interest in A/V collections for the kinds of subjects they often document. But many of these collections are vulnerable, with only a short window of time before the formats will degrade and playback equipment will no longer be available, and the material will become impossible to access.

OCLC Research and the UK's Research Information Network (RIN) conducted a collaborative project to examine the use and provision of information-related tools and services to researchers throughout the lifecycle of the research process. The goal of the project was to discover researchers' needs and desires in a variety of disciplines in UK and US universities.

OCLC Research and Research Libraries UK (RLUK) collaborated to survey library special collections holdings and practices of RLUK members and OCLC Research Library Partnership institutions in the UK and Ireland.

The goal of this project was to promote a culture of sharing finding aid metadata that enables aggregators, consortia and others to more easily use and reuse metadata in finding aids. We planned to accomplish this by leveraging good precedents and providing recommendations on how to state the terms of use and reuse for finding aid metadata.

The OCLC Research Library Partnership Web Archiving Metadata Working Group will evaluate existing and emerging approaches to descriptive metadata for archived websites and will recommend best practices to meet user needs and to ensure discoverability and consistency.