RLG Programs 2008 Annual Partners Meeting
Modeling New Service Infrastructures
Breakout Session Summary

June 2-3, 2008

Background Provided in Advance of Meeting

We believe that libraries, museums, and archives are experiencing a period of rapid transformative change. To assist our partner institutions in effectively navigating these changes while also taking advantage of new opportunities, we seek to model and enable new ways of working. The two main areas of activity are gathering requirements and specifications for new service areas and building prototypes and software to showcase and demonstrate. Specific projects include prototyping new services that maximize the effective use of controlled vocabularies, enhancing disclosure of library, museum, and archive holdings at the network level, and identifying and building consensus around data services required by library systems. This work is also related to, and coordinated with, new developments in OCLC services such as the WorldCat Grid.

Brief Summary of Breakout Discussion

The Modeling New Service Infrastructure breakout came up with the following areas to explore for potential additions to the work agenda:

• Content mining
• Content verification services - services that can provide scholars with the ability to verify original sources when several versions may be available (e.g., preprint, postprint, etc.)
• Metasearching for LAMs - what needs to happen? Also potentially includes investigating a database recommendation service
• ROI assessment tools for services - tools for demonstrating the value of public services
• Web curation and archiving
• Automatic metadata generation

Individuals from partner institutions volunteered to help draft a description of each of these areas and the potential work that could be added to our work agenda in this theme. One or more of these projects may be merged with projects of interest that have come from other breakout groups.

Additional Information

• List of participants
• Presentation: Modeling New Service Infrastructure by Roy Tennant, Janifer Gatenby, Merrilee Proffit, Diane Vizine-Goetz and Bruce Washburn, OCLC Programs and Research (.pdf: 3,505K/23 pp.)
• Partner Presentation: LibraryFind: Better Discovery. Easy Deliver by Jeremy Frumkin, Head of Emerging Technologies at Oregon State University (.pdf: 4,570K/20 pp.)
• Presentation: Collective Services, Collective Collections by Janifer Gatenby, OCLC Research Integration and Standards (.pdf: 2,077K/33 pp.)
• Presentation: Terminology Services by Diane Vizine-Goetz, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist, OCLC Programs and Research (.pdf: 197K/5 pp.)
• Breakout session recap sent to participants