The Cooperative Online Resource Catalog is dutiful news for this university The whole e-book situation went beyond theory at our library at the finis of the Fall 2000 semester undivided night.

The Cooperative Online Resource Catalog is dutiful news for this university

The whole e-book situation went beyond theory at our library at the finis of the Fall 2000 semester undivided night, I happened to check Qcat--Quinnipiac University's OPAC--for Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. QCat showed that the library allowed two copies, and both of them were checked gone out until the last day of classes. Fortunately, we had propose in a link to an online version of Huckleberry Finn, likewise a student who really needinessed 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 of recent origin level of complication for those of us who work with online catalogs. These machines have been adding more and more ingenious 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 universals because the library does not "own" them in the classic understanding The scanned pages of Huckleberry Finn are onward a server at the University of Virginia. Do we provide MARC records because the library acknowledges the books or because we can use the catalog to make them available to our users? If the latter is genuine 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 advance 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 volume was scanned, who was responsible for the work, and what the main division is about. Fortunately, OCLC has been working in succession 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 feeling of the free resources available forward the Web. According to Bill Carney, a consulting market analyst at OCLC the initial goal was to sign 100 libraries up in a touchstone phase during which they would single out Web resources and catalog them in standard MARC or Dublin Core format. Dublin Core was devised by way of OCLC specifically for describing electronic resources. at 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 plot 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 veil out some of the garbage that we all know is public there on the Web. This is just simply an additional category of information final causes from our standpoint. But we've done this forward a global scale, and we have 489 libraries from 24 countries from around the world participating with us in a) developing the tool locate 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 cloyed subject headings and call numbers. The ability to catalog CORC records has since been thrown unclose to any OCLC member institution. Librarians who want to investigate CORC ne no other than go to its Web site at http://corc.oc lc.org and log in with their library's regular password to master to the cataloging module.

After I logg onto the service, I searched for "Quinnipiac." It diverted out that seven Web pages had already been cataloged, moreover 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 in succession the spot. Back in my cataloging days, sole a few selected institutions had the right to correct a record in OCLC in such a manner I approved of this democratization. It took an extra day or in such a manner but later that week the corrected records showed up in FirstSearch's WorldCat database.

The catalog wasn't complete Most notably, there was a record for our library that was created before the institution's Web page was redesigned, to such a degree 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, likewise I "cloned" it and made a corrected record from the archetype I passed the old record to our cataloger to descry if she could discard it using the standard OCLC Passport software. Aside from this glitch, I plant the user interface particularly intuitive. A dropdown chest at the top of the disguise allows you to edit, reformat, save the record with local corrections, or make a correction in the replete database. Although the interface is extremely user-friendly, the first day I tried it, this proces was for a like reason slow that I wasn't firm if anything had happened. forward subsequent days, it did its work in secondarys 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, still when I clicked on the link in the 856 field, it worked perfectly