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The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)'s hierarchical system defines families of bibliographic relationship between records and collocates them better than most extant bibliographic systems. Certain library materials (especially audio-visual […]

The cataloging community has long acknowledged the value of investing in authority control. As bibliographic systems become more global, the need for authority control becomes even more pressing. The publisher description area of the catalog record is notoriously difficult to control, yet often necessary for collection analysis and development. The research presented in this paper details a project to build a database of authorized names for major publishers worldwide. The authors used ISBN prefix data to cluster bibliographic records by publisher; the resulting database contains thousands of variant forms of each publisher's name and data about their publishing output. Profiles of four large publishers were compared. Each publisher's languages of publication, formats, and subjects demonstrated their distinctive publishing output and validated the record clusters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of bodies have been jointly interested in book publication data as measures of cultural diversity. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics is especially interested in global patterns in book publication as expressions of cultural diversity and heritage. Such data, however, are not widely collected by national publishing organizations and library statistics agencies. The increasingly global reach of the WorldCat database, on the other hand, makes it an obvious source for data mining. This paper presents results from an OCLC Research project that produced a rich data portrait of global book publishing, with emphasis on collection analysis by country. Researchers were able to compare the annual publishing for every country of the world (as reflected in WorldCat), the libraries that collect and import a country's works, the monographs their libraries import from other countries, and the proportion of publications in various official and native languages. The results provide a global overview of book publishing and a wealth of case studies in single countries' practices in book publishing and the preservation of their literary heritage. The present paper compares the book publishing and book collections in libraries in six countries around the world and demonstrates the power of data mining within this sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WorldCat, OCLC's bibliographic database, identifies books and the libraries that hold them. The holdings provide detailed information about the type and number of libraries that have acquired the material. Using this information, it is possible to infer the type of audience for which the material is intended. A quantitative measure, the audience level, is derived from the types of libraries that have selected the resource. The audience level can be used to refine discovery, analyze collections, advise readers, and enhance reference services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A challenge facing libraries is to develop and update collections and services to meet the needs of the multiple generations of users with differing approaches to information seeking. The different characteristics and information needs of 'Baby Boomers' and 'Millennials' present a dichotomy for library service and system development. Results are reported here for two research projects that investigated habits and needs of library users and non-users. Both studies sought to identify how and why individuals seek and use information. The first study deals with the findings of focus group interviews with seventy-eight randomly selected participants, and fifteen semi-structured interviews with a subset of these participants. The second study reports the results of focus group interviews with twenty-three Millennials, and an analysis of 492 virtual reference services (VRS) transcripts. The studies indicate that both generations consistently identify Google and human sources as the first sources they use for quick searches. The younger Millennials mentioned consulting parents most frequently, while the older Millennials consult friends and professors. Baby Boomers indicate that they consult their personal libraries and colleagues. The findings have implications for the development of next generation library online catalogs, as well as services, including VRS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]