Online Bibliographic Services SIS
Annual Report, 2006/07

The Online Bibliographic Services SIS was led by a board consisting of Susan Goldner, Chair; Andrea Rabbia, Vice-Chair; Kathy Faust, Secretary/Treasurer; and Members-at-Large, Corinne Jacox and Stephanie Schmitt. Mid-year, Schmitt resigned her position when she took a job out of the country and Caitlin Robinson was appointed to fill her seat.

Hollie White and Janet McKinney were the representatives to the TSLL Board and George Praeger was the representative to MARBI, while Shannon Burchard maintained the OBS website.

The standing committees were chaired by Andrea Rabbia, Education; Richard Jost, Nominations; Mary Jane Kelsey, Local Systems; Pam Deemer, OCLC; Ming Lu, RLIN, and Caitlin Robinson, Joint Research Grant. Because OCLC and RLIN are in the midst of merging, Deemer and Lu cooperated with each other, acting more as co-chairs of one committee. Pat Callahan continued to chair the Special Committee on Record Sharing. This committee conducted a survey of record sharing practices and opinions which they will use to inform further activities. For the New Orleans meeting, Caitlin Robinson coordinated the OBS table in the exhibit hall and Corinne Jacox represented our interests in coordinating the Alphabet Soup reception.

OBS sponsored two programs in New Orleans: “Collection Analysis Made Easy: OCLC's WorldCat Collection Analysis Service,” coordinated by John P. Bissett and Yumin Jiang and “OCLCs WorldCat: Our Collections at the World’s Fingertips,” coordinated by Janet Ann Hedin. OBS co-sponsored two programs with TS-SIS: “Bringing the Library to the User: the Practice” and “Bringing the Library to the User: the Theory.”

In addition, OBS offered an informal program on OCLC and the OCLC/RLIN merger; a vendor showcase on federated searching; committee sponsored roundtables on OCLC/RLIN and Local Systems; a Research Roundtable, moderated by Ellen McGrath; a WorldCat Local Roundtable, moderated by Richard Jost; and a brand new Heads of Systems Roundtable, moderated by Richard Jost.

The new Strategic Plan was approved by the members at the 2006 meeting in St. Louis. The board worked to include it in their planning for the year.

With the help of AALL headquarters staff, Corinne Jacox completely redesigned the OBS-SIS brochure. Since it had been several years since the last redesign, this new publicity tool was much needed.

Although we started the year slightly in the red, by keeping our expenditures to a minimum even while offering more informal programming, we were able to end the year with a positive balance in our financial account.

Kathy Faust ran the election this year, the second done electronically. The newly elected officers for 2007-2008 are Michael Maben, Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect; Mary Strouse, Secretary/Treasurer; and Susan Karpuk, Member-at-Large.

Susan Goldner, Chair