OCLC Publishes 2021-2022 Annual Report
From the President’s Welcome to the Report by Skip Prichard, OCLC President and Chief Executive Officer:
This report highlights innovations and accomplishments of the past year. It celebrates the work of more than a thousand OCLC associates who worked tirelessly to deliver new and updated services. The results showcase what was a remarkable breakthrough year. Despite significant headwinds, we released new research, services, and product enhancements that are making a significant difference for libraries around the world.
A few highlights:
- We invested heavily in the quality of WorldCat®, the global infrastructure used by tens of thousands of libraries. We enriched and improved more than 26 million records and participating libraries helped enrich a million more. Through new investments in machine learning, we eliminated 6 million duplicate records and prevented 400 million duplicate records from being added.
- A newly designed knowledge base fast-tracked the ability of libraries to deliver e-content to their users. On average, electronic resources are now available twenty times faster.
- We released a free, streamlined holdings update service, making library collections more discoverable.
- We expanded our decade-long partnership with Google by adding more than 81 million library catalog links to Google Search results. We are now the largest provider of library data to Google and are working to add even more library collections to this program.
- We completed development of the reimagined WorldCat.org, providing libraries the opportunity to be visible where the search for information begins. The new WorldCat.org is more user-friendly, fully mobile, and more secure, and for the first time ever, able to include electronic resources from library collections.
- We dramatically improved resource sharing efficiency and performance. The data we collectively share in WorldCat and our network enabled libraries to reduce average turnaround time among libraries in our Express program by 50%. We introduced smart lender strings, which improved turnaround times by another 36%.
- OCLC Research continued to guide the community with critical analysis and recommendations. The REALM project helped libraries assess the implications of COVID-19 variants, vaccines, and facilities requirements. Reimagining Descriptive Workflows sets out a community agenda to address harm caused by legacy cataloging practices in cultural institutions.
- And we accomplished so much more, including 200 new enhancements to WorldShare® Management Services (WMS), 58 new libraries in Europe joining the OCLC Wise® public library community, and tens of thousands of librarians learning through our WebJunction® platform.
Direct to Complete 2021-2022 OCLC Annual Report
Filed under: Data Files, Libraries, News, Patrons and Users, Reports
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.