Metadata, or data about data, is becoming a major concern of librarians. The OCLC Office of Research plans to tackle the matter by launching a project to pursue the cooperative creation and sharing by libraries of metadata. The Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) project will explore the cooperative creation of a catalog of Internet resources. Among the goals of the project are producing HTML pages suitable for use on library portal sites, providing the ability to mix local and shared information, allowing easy upgrading of records, sharing and minimizing link maintenance, and providing automated support for metadata creation and maintenance.
OCLC has already created NetFirst, a database of more than 100,000 records entered and maintained by its staff, and InterCat, a database of 45,000 records contributed by more than 1,000 libraries. These databases will be the starting point for CORC, but automated techniques will be used to build the new database more rapidly so that it can keep up with the exploding Web.
Additional information and applications are available via e-mail.
[Contact: OCLC at corc@OCLC.org].
