This update includes:
. Meeting for OCLC Research Library Partners - the Library in the Life of the User . New Report, The Archival Advantage: Integrating Archival Expertise into Management of Born-digital Library Materials . International Linked Data Survey for Implementers - last chance! . Works In Progress Webinar: Looking inside the Library Knowledge Vault Plus. where you'll find us and "of note" from OCLC Research (WorldCat's smallest and largest worksets). Best regards, Merrilee Highlights for the OCLC Research Library Partnership Meeting for OCLC Research Library Partners - the Library in the Life of the User OCLC Research Library Partners are invited to join us for a day and a half of presentations from library leaders, design and ethnography practitioners, and librarians. Learn and be inspired. This meeting will take place at The Westin Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Illinois on 21-22 October 2015. As user behaviors and user expectations change, it is vital that libraries understand these important shifts, and effectively reposition services in order to most usefully serve their constituencies. Ethnographic work and design thinking have underlined the importance of understanding actual behaviors, and provided some techniques to do this in rapidly changing environments. It has made libraries more aware of the need to be visible and engage with their constituencies. And it has highlighted the importance of understanding workflow and incentives as services are reconfigured in a network environment. It thus provides an important context for understanding how behaviors and technology are increasingly infused. Ethnographic approaches in libraries have formed an important and influential strand of work in recent years, beginning with the formative and influential large scale study on student behavior at the University of Rochester beginning in 2004. An important outcome of this work has inspired other institutions to pursue their own lines of inquiry, recruiting staff with ethnographic/anthropological or user-centered design backgrounds. Findings have been illuminating and inspiring, helping us to overcome preexisting assumptions about patrons, based on what we saw inside the library. Ethnography and design thinking can help to bring insights into the life of the user, outside the library that can help us to think about providing more meaningful support based on what students and others really do, the importance and significance of convenience and satisficing, and the importance of understanding real and not imagined workflows. Register now <http://www.oclc.org/research/events/2015/10-21.html> - we will be posting further details as we finalize our program. Have you done ethnographic or design influenced work that you would like to see featured in this meeting? Please let us know <mailto:[email protected]?subject=Library%20in%20the%20Life%20of%20the%20Use r> . New Report, The Archival Advantage: Integrating Archival Expertise into Management of Born-digital Library Materials This essay argues for involving archivists in the management of born-digital library materials (i.e., created and managed in digital form), and focuses on ten areas of archival expertise and their relevance to the digital context. The intended audiences for this publication include library directors and other managers who set the vision and direction for digital initiatives; technology specialists who manage systems and services in areas such as repository design, hardware and software, digitization, and website development; research data curation experts; digital preservationists; liaison librarians who have close relationships with users, including knowledge of their research methods; and metadata specialists. Archivists may find value in both the explication of the ten areas of archival expertise and the arguments for including them in a wide range of digital initiatives. You can read the report <http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2015/oclcresearch-archival-advant age-2015.html> and also read Jackie Dooley's post on our group blog, HangingTogether, Archivists should be key players in managing born-digital library materials <http://hangingtogether.org/?p=5271> . International Linked Data Survey for Implementers - last chance! OCLC Research is repeating its survey to learn details of specific projects or services that format metadata as linked data and/or make subsequent uses of it. OCLC Research Library Partners Metadata Managers Focus Group members are aware that many in the libraries/archives/museum community are excited by the potential of linked data applications to make new, valuable uses of existing metadata. If you or a colleague have implemented or are implementing linked data projects or services-either by publishing data as linked data or ingesting linked data resources into your own data or applications-please take the survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LinkedDataSurvey2015 Expected time to complete the survey: 15-20 minutes for each project described. We ask that responses be completed by 17 July 2015. As with last year's survey, examples collected will be shared for the benefit of others wanting to undertake similar efforts, wondering what is possible to do and how to go about it. Participating institutions will be identified with the projects described, but contact information will be held confidential. Responses to this survey will be valuable to others who are also interested in starting Linked Data projects. If you took the survey last year, please take this year's as well, as things might have changed. The questions are the same, but some multiple choice questions have additional options taken from the "other" responses in last year's survey, and some open-ended questions have been changed to multiple choice, again based on last year's responses. You can check what you answered last year on this publicly available spreadsheet, "Results of Linked Data Survey for Implementers <http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/activities/linkeddata/oclc-researc h-linked-data-implementers-survey-2014.xlsx> ." Please feel free to share the above link to the survey. We'd like as many responses as possible! Works in Progress Webinars: Looking inside the Library Knowledge Vault Jeff Mixter and Bruce Washburn, OCLC Research Wednesday August 12, 2015 12:00-1:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time / (9:00-10:00 am Pacific Daylight Time / 5:00-6:00 pm London) How do we ascertain truth on the web? That's a question being pursued by researchers at Google who have articulated a flow of data that generates discrete statements of fact from countless web sources, relates those statements to previously assembled stores of knowledge, and fuses these mathematically to identify which statements may be more "truthful" than others. They describe this assembly of scored statements as a "Knowledge Vault." As OCLC works with data from library, archive and museum sources, we grapple with the same question and similarly varying data. Though the number of statements made is smaller and there may be fewer conflicts, we benefit by taking a closer look at the Google Knowledge Vault <http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Papers/kv-kdd14.pdf> idea, to see how it applies to a vault of library knowledge. In this webinar we'll provide an update on how we're evaluating this idea, including: . extracting simple statements about entities and their relationships from bibliographic and authority records, . establishing a relevant score for similar statements provided by different sources, . viewing the Library Knowledge Vault data using a prototype application, . and testing how statements contributed by users of that prototype can find their way back to the Vault. Register for this webinar now <https://oclc.webex.com/oclc/onstage/g.php?d=716059333&t=a> - a recorded version of the session will be available afterwards. What are we working on? What are you working on? This OCLC Research Library Partnership occasional webinar series is a place for us to talk about work happening in OCLC Research - we'd like to present our work informally and get feedback from you, our Partners. We'd also like this to be a venue for Partner institutions. What are you working on that everyone should know about? What input would help you move forward? <mailto:[email protected]?subject=Works%20in%20progress%20webinar> Let us know! The Partnership now spans from Western Australia to Central Europe, which means it is not easy for us to schedule at times that work for everyone. However, we always record our webinars, and we are also more than happy to either host a discussion following one of our webinars, or repeat a webinar if feasible. Please ask! Not available to attend a webinar at the scheduled time? If you register for this webinar <https://oclc.webex.com/oclc/onstage/g.php?d=716059333&t=a> we will send you an email when the recording and slides are available. Where you'll find us You will find staff that supports the OCLC Research Partnership at the following events: . Wikimania, Mexico City, July 17-19: Merrilee Proffitt will attend. . VIVO 2015 conference, Cambridge, MA, August 12-14: Karen Smith-Yoshimura will attend. . Society of American Archivists Annual meeting, Cleveland, Ohio, August 15-22: Jackie Dooley, Merrilee Proffitt will attend along with OCLC Research staff Jeff Mixter, Ixchel Faniel, and Bruce Washburn and OCLC Member Relations Liaison Karri Sites. Please seek us out to give us your ideas and find out more about our work. Of note from OCLC Research WorldCat's smallest and largest worksets Karen Smith-Yoshimura takes a deep dive into WorldCat to look at WorldCat <http://hangingtogether.org/?p=5295> 's smallest and largest worksets - see if you can guess one or more works that are in the top ten of the largest workset category. -- Merrilee Proffitt OCLC . 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