With Cataloguing Colleagues in OCLC Reception

Mauro Guerrini, Elena Escolano Rodríguez, Barbara Tillett and me (Ben Gu):

NLC Staff Meeting Held Today

The Annual Staff Meeting of National Library of China was held today in NLC Concert Hall. About 1000 staff members attended the meeting. Dr. Furui Zhan, Director of the library, presented a report for the year of 2008 and a plan for the year of 2009. Mr. Heping Zhou, Vice-Minister of Culture, also attended the meeting.
During the meeting, the Chinese Acquisitions & Cataloging Department (I am the director of the department) received two awards respectively for the excellent services of the Online Library Cataloging Center and for the innovative services though the cooperation of Chinese bibliographic records uploaded to OCLC's WorldCat.

NLC Records Displayed in WorldCat.org

National Library of China (NLC) submitted automatically converted MARC21 records of all its holdings of monographs to OCLC early this month. Today, I realized that some records (of the year of 2007) have been uploaded to WorldCat.org, such as:
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/288942397&tab=holdings?loc=china
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/181359658&tab=holdings?loc=china

NLC MARC Records Submitted to OCLC

After 8 years of discussions and 2 years of formal contacts, we submitted all the restrspective records (about 1.5 million) of National Library of China (OCLC Symbol: N5L) to OCLC this week. Today, I received a group mail from OCLC CJK Users Group to explain the characteristics of the converted Chinese records. This is the first step for Chinese bibliographic records to enter the international library community. I hope we can further promote the internationalization of library cataloging in China.

Chinese records for OCLC under final test

Today, I read an article "National Library of China to add its records to OCLC WorldCat" (more information at: http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/20085.htm), in Nextspace, No. 9, published by OCLC. Since the later part of the last year, there have been many discussions about the cooperation between NLC and OCLC. The cooperation was first announced in August 2007 during the WLIC in Durban, and the agreement was signed at the beginning of 2008.

However, we have submitted several batches of test records to OCLC until the end of July. I think the last test file is about to be passed, and we will submit our full records to OCLC in the next couple of months.

OCLC's CEO visited National Library of China

Mr. Jay Jordan, OCLC's CEO, visited National Library of China today in the morning. Dr. ZHAN Furui, Director of National Library of China, and some of his colleagues met with OCLC guests. Among the OCLC guests, Mr. Andrew Wang, vice-president of OCLC, Ms. Shu-En Tsai, Director of Asia-Pacific Services, and some of their colleagues from the OCLC China Office also attended the meeting.

We talked about the CNMARC-MARC21 conversion test files for the uploading of NLC Chinese records in the near future, and our mutual interest in the OCLC membership development.

OCLC's automated processing of personal name headings in WorldCat

I received a message from Glenn Patton about the automated processing identify, modify, and control specific types of personal name headings in OCLC WorldCat bibliographic records. This processing, based on data used to build WorldCat Identities (http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/) and developed by Thom Hickey, Chief Scientist in the OCLC Office of Programs and Research, is projected to control more than 26,000,000 headings over the next few weeks.

Dr. Hickey has posted a description of the project on his blog, Outgoing, at
http://outgoing.typepad.com/outgoing/2008/04/controlling-nam.html