I have just listened to Karen Calhoun’s presentation to the OCLC Members’ Council October meeting. At the same time I clicked through her presentation.

Her presentation, WorldCat and the future of bibliographic control (Karen Calhoun, Vice President, WorldCat and Metadata Services, OCLC), included audience participation. They were given electronic devices to record their answers to some questions and the results compared with the Warren report which I previously posted (Director’s views on the future of cataloguing) about. The Warren report is based on a survey of Australian and New Zealand directors.

Find some time to listen and watch this presentation to see how the OCLC members answered the same questions.

 Her slides on assumptions and mindsets are food for thought. I also found her discussion about Dewey Decimal Classification as a valuable source of data just waiting to be harnessed very interesting. It is multilingual, it has a network of relationships and it is mapped to taxonomies and terminologies, and it has been used for years and years to classify enormous numbers of resources.