OCLC's CORC in the Library - Cooperative Online Resource Catalog - Brief Article

The Cooperative Online Resource Catalog is serviceable news for this university

The whole e-book situation went beyond theory at our library at the extreme point of the Fall 2000 semester individual night, I happened to check Qcat--Quinnipiac University's OPAC--for Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. QCat showed that the library possessed two copies, and both of them were checked on the outside until the last day of classes. Fortunately, we had set in a link to an online version of Huckleberry Finn, for a like reason a student who really necessityed it could start reading with the click of a mouse. Being online in 2001 means that you have potential access to a growing library that contains all of the world's major classics prior to 1900

It also adds a novel level of complication for those of us who work with online catalogs. These machines have been adding more and more capable ways to answer the questions that the card catalog answered for our parents: What's in the library, and where can I find it? Adding links to online resources challenges our general [i]or[/i] abstract notions because the library does not "own" them in the classic faculty of perception The scanned pages of Huckleberry Finn are upon a server at the University of Virginia. Do we provide MARC records because the library holds the books or because we can use the catalog to make them available to our users? If the latter is authentic then it's perfectly legitimate to include that electronic item in our online catalog.

If we're going to make links to Web resources, then we ne to make progress beyond the first tentative pace that we followed in our library: adding a link to an existing MARC record. We should have a record that describes in detail which edition of the work was scanned, who was responsible for the work, and what the volume is about. Fortunately, OCLC has been working upon such a project, and all of us will be the winners.

CORC

The OCLC Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) began in January 1999 as an initiative to help librarians make faculty of perception of the free resources available upon the Web. According to Bill Carney, a consulting market analyst at OCLC the initial goal was to sign 100 libraries up in a trial phase during which they would pick Web resources and catalog them in standard MARC or Dublin Core format. Dublin Core was devised by means of OCLC specifically for describing electronic resources. by dint of June 2000 the CORC records were added to the main OCLC database.

In the December 2000 issue of Information Today [page 26 and http://www.infotoday.com/it/dec00/hogan.htm], OCLC CEO Jay Jordan described the cast to Tom Hogan: "What we are doing with CORC is involving libraries in a selection proces and producing, upon behalf of library patrons, a mechanism to shield out some of the garbage that we all know is without there on the Web. This is just simply an additional category of information percepts from our standpoint. But we've done this upon a global scale, and we have 489 libraries from 24 countries from around the world participating with us in a) developing the tool plant on the fly and b) building the catalog of Web resources." In other words, CORC catalogs the Web's resources in the same way that OCLC libraries have treated other media--giving the sites replete subject headings and call numbers. The ability to catalog CORC records has since been thrown render free of access to any OCLC member institution. Librarians who want to investigate CORC ne single go to its Web site at http://corc.oc lc.org and log in with their library's regular password to procure to the cataloging module.

After I logg onto the service, I searched for "Quinnipiac." It revolveed out that seven Web pages had already been cataloged, on the contrary all of them bore the name "Quinnipiac College"--a title that was discarded in favor of Quinnipiac University 6 month earlier. I was happily surprised to find that I had the right to make the corrections upon the spot. Back in my cataloging days, sole a few selected institutions had the right to correct a record in OCLC for a like reason I approved of this democratization. It took an extra day or in the way that but later that week the corrected records showed up in FirstSearch's WorldCat database.

The catalog wasn't finished Most notably, there was a record for our library that was created before the institution's Web page was redesigned, with equal reason it led to a dead link. When you call up a CORC record for editing, it displays the MARC record in the upper frame and the Web resource itself in the lower. After a half hour of trying, I could not correct the record, with equal reason I "cloned" it and made a corrected record from the transcript I passed the old record to our cataloger to diocese if she could discard it using the standard OCLC Passport software. Aside from this glitch, I rest the user interface particularly intuitive. A dropdown chest at the top of the guard allows you to edit, reformat, save the record with local corrections, or make a correction in the replete database. Although the interface is real user-friendly, the first day I tried it, this proces was with equal reason slow that I wasn't certain if anything had happened. upon subsequent days, it did its work in next to the firsts and the record I was unsure of was in FirstSearch the nearest morning . Another glitch was the record for QCat. When I called it up in CORC, an error message at the bottom said that the URL was invalid, on the other hand when I clicked on the link in the 856 field, it worked perfectly