Lietuvių 
OCLC seminar in Vilnius on 19-09-2012
2012-09-25
OCLC representatives from the OCLC office in the Netherlands with the help of Harry Janssen, a national of the Netherlands residing in Lithuania, gave a seminar for Lithuanian libraries. Participants were welcomed by Director-General of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania Prof. Dr. Renaldas Gudauskas.
OCLC’s motto is “Connecting people to knowledge through library cooperation”. It is achieved through establishing, maintaining and operating a computerized library network and promoting the evolution of library use, of libraries themselves and of librarianship, and providing processes and products for the benefit of library users and libraries, including such objectives as increasing availability of library resources to individual library patrons and reducing the rate-of-rise of library per-unit costs. For more than 40 years, OCLC and its members have been building a library coope rative and managing a computer network that creates economies of scale, enabling more and more libraries to reduce costs and share resources. The idea of using technology to extend cooperation has grown into a worldwide organization in which almost 26 000 libraries, archives and museums in 170 countries are members. Making use of the latest trends in technology and library practice will advance the value of library services. Philosophy of cooperation developed by OCLC more than 40 years ago, thrives in a digital age that offers libraries, archives and museums tremendous new opportunities to connect people with knowledge and information.
Dr. Rein van Charldorp (OCLC) gave an interesting presentation about the current role of OCLC, highlighting such products as VIAF and WorldShare. He emphasized that the younger generation do not generally look for information on library web sites, but use search engines and social media tools instead. In this connection, focal points for the future policy of libraries were discussed: do they need to have in-house services or make use of facilities available somewhere in the world and thus reduce their costs.
After Dr. Rein van Charldorp's presentation a lively discussion developed with a particular focus on the possibility to deliver records from the Lithuanian National Bibliographic Databank to OCLC’s WorldCat. Technically, the harvesting problem was solved was at the end of 2010, but price is an obstacle.
René Steunenberg, account manager from OCLC, gave a comprehensive presentation about OCLC products.
Here is a presentation from the seminar.
