The Cornell University Library’s (CUL’s) tactical plan calls for integrating traditional and digital resources and services in support of the Cornell community’s information needs. OCLC’s Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) research project has the potential to help CUL’s librarians move more quickly toward managing the massive amount of material becoming available on the World Wide Web and providing intellectual access to relevant, high quality information there.

The OCLC Office of Research runs CORC. The CORC experimental system puts in place a framework for cooperative cataloging of Web resources that features mapping between Dublin Core and MARC; highly automated creation of metadata records in Dublin Core and MARC; export of metadata in HTML, RDF and MARC; import, generation, and export of portal pages; and numerous other features. Access to CORC is restricted to OCLC members.

The CORC project provides an infrastructure for experimenting with new standards and technologies that would be difficult for CUL to replicate at the local level. Through participation in CORC, CUL could expect to:

• Select and catalog new Internet resources of interest to the CUL community (we could opt to focus on a specific class of resources—for example, Web resources created at CU—of shared interest to members of the CUL research team)

• Experiment with the centralized, cooperative creation of portal pages (subject guides) of particular interest to CUL users

• Provide staff with the opportunity to gain a greater understanding of and practical experience with Dublin Core, highly automated record creation, and other new standards

• Provide free access to the CORC database across campus (although record creation will be restricted to project participants)

Our specific research objectives include:

• Comparing record editing/creation in CORC to the procedures and technology now in use for resource description of Web resources (e.g., speed, ease of use, content of records (DC vs. MARC), record transfer capability (MARC, RDF/XML import and export), etc.)

• Assessing the level, education and training needed for cataloging, using the CORC model of highly automated resource description

• Exploring the feasibility of a new workflow for record creation, with the reference librarian or selector entering the URLs into CORC and generating a preliminary record, then the cataloger further refining the record.

• Evaluating the feasibility of a centralized, cooperative system such as CORC for creating and maintaining subject guides to Web resources (including shared, centralized maintenance of URLs)

• Evaluating the usefulness of the CORC model for networked resource selection

If CUL staff began the CORC project and learned that participation was going to require double keying of records (once in CORC and again in our OPAC), we could not continue. It is imperative that we have a way of moving records from CORC into our local system that does not require intervention or assistance from CUL systems staff.

We plan to devote 0.5 FTE to the project, as requested by OCLC. We anticipate structuring our effort as indicated in Table 1.

Table 1. Proposed Staffing

We propose a six month project. In that period of time, implementing this plan would require approximately 500 hours of CUL staff time.

We will need to submit an application form to the OCLC Office of Research. Pending approval of our plan by CUL administration and acceptance of our application by OCLC, we plan to follow the timeline and plan of work in Table 2.

Table 2. Proposed Time Line and Plan of Work

Karen Calhoun

Phone: 607 255-9915

E-mail: ksc10@cornell.edu