AALL Annual Meeting – Orlando, Florida, July 20-24, 2002

The Annual Meeting is rapidly approaching, and I hope that many of you will be able to attend, especially the OCLC/WLN Committee meeting. The Annual Meeting is one of the highlights of the year professionally for me—I always come away with new ideas and concepts to put into practice, along with having the opportunity to see and speak with many of my colleagues from around the country.

The Committee will meet on Monday, July 22nd, from 7 am-8 am. The meeting will be at the Orange County Convention Center (it has been moved from the Peabody Hotel). A continental breakfast will be served. Our speaker representing OCLC will be Mr. William Caine of SOLINET out of Atlanta. Mr. Caine will be speaking about OCLC's transition to the new interface, and he will be available to answer questions you might have about OCLC's service. If you have any ideas or topics you would like to have discussed, please let me know so that I may suggest them to Mr. Caine in advance. Last year in Minneapolis we had an excellent discussion with much give and take among the OCLC and MINITEX representatives and the attendees. I hope that we will have a similar discussion this year. This is your chance to speak directly with an OCLC representative and to ask those questions that concern you (and probably many others in room). Please make plans to attend. In continuing with last year, there will be a door prize. Unfortunately, it will not be a beautiful handmade afghan donated by Susan Chinoransky (Susan has already gone the extra mile for the committee). If you work for or went to school at one of the four schools that were in the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament (Maryland, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Kansas), you will definitely want to be present. There may be an additional door prize of something chocolate. I will look forward to seeing many of you there.

Migration to the new OCLC interface

The migration to the new interface continues on schedule. According to OCLC, in February CatME was "enhanced again to include a terminal module to allow you to connect to your local system to run macros between CatME and your local system." OCLC states that with the first release of the new interface "CORC and CatExpress functionality become part of the new interface." In fact, in the April issue of Bits and Pieces, OCLC announced that on June 30, 2002, the new cataloging interface will be introduced and the CORC product name will be retired. June 30th is a Sunday, so for most of us July 1st will be our first look at the new interface. This is exactly 3 weeks before our open discussion meeting in Orlando. I suspect that we will have a lot to talk about at the meeting.

One thing to remember about the new interface is there is a transition time built in to making the switch. Users are not required to cut over on July 1, 2002. Passport will continue to be supported through December of 2002, and Passport will work with the system until December 2003. So the date libraries will be forced off of Passport is January 2004. This gives libraries and users 18 months to make the transition.

I would suggest that you go to OCLC's website at www.oclc.org/strategy/cataloging and review the updated Guide to Migration and the Frequently Asked Questions for the latest information and to refresh your memory as to what it going to happen. This will be the biggest change that most of us have ever seen with OCLC, and we need to be prepared to lead our libraries and staff in making the transition.

Steering by Standards videoconference

As I write this in late April, two of the three scheduled Steering by Standards videoconferences have occurred (the final one is scheduled for May 29th). I have had the opportunity to view both so far. The first two have dealt with open archives and data sharing. The first one was titled "A New Harvest: Revealing Hidden Resources with the Open Archives Metadata Harvesting Protocol" and featured the individual who virtually invented the protocol—Herbert Van de Sompel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the British Library. The second session was titled "OAIS [Open Archival Information System] Imperative: Enduring Record or Digital Dust?" and included Donald Sawyer of NASA as the keynote speaker. The final session features Barbara Tillett of the Library of Congress speaking on "Paper Past, Digital Future: Managing Metadata Standards in Transition."

The sessions have been very interesting and informative. OCLC has gone directly to the experts to talk about these topics. The sessions have included expert practitioners, and the second one had an archivist from the National Archives and Records Administration. Some of what he said resonated with me due to my interest in genealogy and family history, and how NARA makes its data available (things like military service records, pension records, etc.). If you have an opportunity to see the videotapes of these sessions, I would highly recommend it.

OCLC Committee's website

The OCLC Committee now has a home on the Web. Please check it out at www.aallnet.org/sis/obssis and click on OCLC Committee.

Toll-free number for reporting errors

Finally, OCLC now has a toll-free fax phone number to report errors or changes to records that require proof. The number is 1-866-709-6252. Send in those corrections!