Dear Colleagues,
This week's update contains:
·Details of an upcoming Partnership Briefing on 27 February in
Washington, D.C.
·Notice that the MissingMaterials.org blog will close at the end of 2012
·A reminder that we want your finding aids for a new typescript finding
aid conversion project
Best regards,
Melissa
Melissa Renspie
Senior Communications Officer
[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*
*Join Us for the OCLC Research Library Partnership Briefing in
Washington, D.C., *
*Monday, 27 February from 10:30 a.m.--noon*
/Open to OCLC Research Library Partners and Special Invitees Only/
Given the general austerity measures being taken by most institutions,
we are experimenting with the notion of holding frequent regional update
sessions. These will typically be scheduled around our staff travel, and
other events where we expect at least some of our Partners will be
gathering; in this way, we hope that our Partner staff will be able to
stretch their travel budgets a little further and still be able to stay
informed about current activities and participation opportunities within
the Partnership.
Our next Partnership Briefing will take place on Monday 27 February in
Washington, D.C. from 10:30 a.m. to noon. We are grateful to the
Smithsonian Institution Libraries for graciously offering a meeting
room. The exact meeting location will be shared in a follow-up note to
confirmed attendees.
We'll use the time together to take a look at some new projects and
initiatives that have recently launched (or will be started in the next
few months). Each of these projects represent opportunities for your
institutions to get involved, and in many cases we are looking for your
input, so we'll also have time for group discussion.
·Please RSVP to Jeanette McNicol
<mailto:[email protected]?subject=RVSP%20Washington%20DC%20briefing>
with the names, job titles and e-mail addresses of everyone from your
institution who will attend the briefing no later than Tuesday 21 February.
Senior Program Officer Merrilee Proffitt
<http://www.oclc.org/research/people/proffitt.htm> will facilitate the
session and looks forward to meeting staff from many of our old and
established as well as new Partner Institutions in the Washington, D.C.
area. Do you have questions about your affiliation? About a project or
activity? Feel free to get in touch at any time with any of us
<http://www.oclc.org/research/people/default.htm>---we're always happy
to hear directly from our Partners!
**
*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*
*MissingMaterials.org is Now Read-only; Will Close at End of 2012*
We want to alert you that the MissingMaterials.org experiment
<http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/missingmaterials/default.htm>
will close at the end of 2012. Effective immediately, the blog will be
read-only until 31 December 2012.
OCLC Research developed MissingMaterials.org with the guidance of the
rare book and law enforcement community, in order to provide a
long-desired venue for transparency about theft and loss in libraries
and archives. However, the service never achieved the broad usage and
adoption we all hoped for: only 10 institutions registered WorldCat
Lists and few items were tagged. And although there were 188 posts to
the blog, it is not clear if MissingMaterials.org contributed to
recovery of any materials.
While the decision to close MissingMaterials.org is disappointing, there
have been many positive outcomes from this project. The Working Group
has ensured that the community paid greater attention to transparency
about theft and loss, and the project promoted collaboration with
booksellers and law enforcement. For example, the Antiquarian
Booksellers' Association of American (ABAA) has adopted social media to
broadcast news of thefts.
This project also did much to promote ideas about how to manage loss in
a transparent manner. We held two webinars
<http://www.oclc.org/research/events/webinars.htm#mm> and published an
article <http://www2.archivists.org/sites/all/files/AO-MarApr2011_0.pdf>
in /Archival Outlook/ about the outcomes of the Working Group. Jennifer
Schaffner also spoke about MissingMaterials.org at a panel at ALA
<http://www.rbms.info/conferences/conf-docs/2010/index.shtml> with an
attorney, an FBI agent and Mark Dimunation from the Library of Congress.
In addition, the concept of using a light touch to alert the community
has resonated in many quarters. Development of the free Missing
Materials procedure helped OCLC Research staff learn to build services
quickly and inexpensively, to meet functional requirements scoped by the
Working Group and to repurpose "good-enough" low-overhead components,
such as blog software. This has helped to inspire other experimental
systems that made greater use of off-the-shelf software, such as the new
ArchiveGrid <http://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/> and Website for
Small Libraries <http://experimental.worldcat.org/lib/>.
So despite the fact that MissingMaterials.org is closing, we'd like to
thank and congratulate everyone who participated in this great experiment.
Jennifer Schaffner
Eric Childress
Bruce Washburn
Merrilee Proffitt
**
*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*
**
*Reminder: We Want Your Finding Aids*
**
The results of the 1998 Special Collections in ARL Libraries
<http://www.arl.org/bm%7Edoc/spec_colls_in_arl.pdf> and the follow-up
2009 OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives
<http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-11.pdf>
revealed that "hidden collections" are a challenge for archives and
special collections. Usually, the term hidden collections brings to mind
unprocessed and undescribed collections. But what about collections that
are processed and described, but the collection descriptions are
unavailable online? These off-line collection descriptions represent a
special type of hidden collection, and also a special opportunity; the
difficult intellectual work of arranging and describing collections is
done and in theory, this is a last-mile problem which can be tackled
with a small suite of tools and technology.
OCLC Research is in the early stages of a small scale experiment that
will explore the effectiveness of tools and techniques for bringing
offline descriptions to the open Web using the Beta version of
ArchiveGrid <http://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid>.
Do you have typescript finding aids? Are you interested in experimenting
with us? If so, drop a note to Senior Program Officer Merrilee Proffitt
<mailto:[email protected]?subject=Rough%20and%20ready%20finding%20aids>.
If you'd like to contribute electronic finding aids to ArchiveGrid, we'd
love to hear from you as well!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Learn more about our RSS feeds <http://www.oclc.org/rss/default.htm>
See what we're talking about in our blog, hangingtogether
<http://hangingtogether.org/>
Check out our podcasts and webinars in iTunes
<http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=284764834>
Learn about our weekly newsletter, /Above the Fold
<http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/newsletters/abovethefold/default.htm>/
Get in touch <mailto:[email protected]>
<mailto:[email protected]>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
<mailto:[email protected]>
