THE CORC RESEARCH PROJECT - OCLC�S INITIATIVE FOR ACCESSING INTERNET RESOURCES

Patricia Layzell Ward, Editor, Library Link

We read a great deal today about the benefits of the Internet, know how it can help to check a fact when working on a paper late at night at home; but we are also aware of the problems of searching for that elusive fact and when found, knowing whether it is accurate. That�s the time when we know that the demand for librarians will grow, rather than fade, and that there needs to be a form of quality control.

OCLC has taken yet another step forward in developing its Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) project - one more innovation from a remarkable organisation. The word �remarkable� is appropriate, since OCLC is still a comparatively young organisation founded just 21 years ago, yet it has united librarians around the globe to increase access to national collections of literature. This has overcome technological, language and cultural barriers. And now it takes another leap forward with CORC which it describes as its most ambitious to date. CORC is to explore the creation of a database of Web resources using automated cataloguing tools and library co-operation. The OCLC Newsletter for May/June indicates that "working together through CORC, librarians will apply the traditional practices and principles of librarianship - selection, description and classification - to improve end-user access to Web materials. The project participants will help test, refine, and use new tools in a cutting-edge, collaborative project designed to build the next-generation catalog of Web resources".

Work is already underway in a number of organisations, in the private and the public sector, to develop metadata standards and technologies, such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and HTML standards, by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) of which OCLC is a member. So the work moves forward and OCLC will work with a self-selected group of libraries in a new co-operative approach to building a "useful catalog of library-selected Web resources".

CORC has emerged in the OCLC Office of Research from a group of independent projects whose results converged, supported and overlapped each other. A co-operative catalog model was the approach chosen which would incorporate: "cooperative cataloging of Web resources; accommodating both local and shared metadata; supporting a catalog of metadata for physical and digital items; authority control for access points; RDF/XML import/export; Pathfinder (i.e. portal page) import/export; integration of Dublin Core and MARC in a single system; flexible harvesting of resources; Unicode support; assisted classification and subject heading assignment; automatic keyword extraction; automated data extraction; link maintenance; reference access -Z39.50 browsing interfaces".

A prototype system has been developed and libraries invited to participate. More than 80 have signed up from the US, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Australia and Asia.

This is clearly a project of considerable importance to the profession, which will achieve its goals through partnership - and the skills, and imagination of those partners.

The OCLC Newsletter May/June 1999 gives more detail about CORC and can be accessed at www.oclc.org/oclc/new/list.htm

Patricia Layzell Ward
With grateful acknowledgement to OCLC.

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