United Kingdom: OCLC Awarded Contract to Develop New “National Bibliographic Knowledgebase” For UK Higher Ed Community

From a Joint OCLC/Jisc Announcement:

JISC today announced that OCLC has been awarded the contract to develop a new National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK).
The NBK, originally proposed in Jisc’s National Monograph Strategy, will support the learning and research needs of the UK higher education community.
The vision is to extend the capabilities of the current Copac service, by investing in technology that can ingest diverse library data at higher speed and greater volume.
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“This exciting collaborative partnership is an important part of building a national digital library for the UK,” explains Neil Grindley, head of resource discovery at Jisc.
“The NBK will be a genuine knowledgebase combining information from various sources to tackle the collection management challenges facing UK academic institutions. The building of this system will be a shared community endeavor. We are working closely with RLUK, SCONUL, The British Library, individual representatives from academic libraries, publishers, licensing organisations and service providers to try and really think through how to realise transformational change.”
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The library community is grappling with two core challenges as budgets come under threat. Firstly, the need to make important decisions about the ongoing management of their print and digital book collections. Secondly, to ensure that researchers and learners have sustainable and convenient access to digital books.
The NBK is regarded as a key element in the delivery against these issues, providing a source of information that libraries can confidently rely upon when making decisions about the future of the resources that they manage and make accessible.
Supported by WorldCat, the world’s largest aggregation of library data, the project is due to start this month, with launch of a beta service projected in January 2018.
Speaking on behalf of OCLC, Eric van Lubeek, Vice President, Managing Director OCLC EMEA and APAC said:
“The mechanisms in place as part of the NBK will enable shared bibliographic metadata to flow into WorldCat and other systems, such as global search engines. Libraries around the world are looking forward to being able to easily locate material from the rich collections of UK academic institutions. The NBK will also interoperate with a number of sources to describe where books are kept, in what formats and under what conditions they are available to be used. Going forward we will build on our collaborative approach to integrate this service with additional discovery, analysis and management tools, including WorldShare Management Services.”

Read the Complete Joint Announcement

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