WorldCat Registry

[Chirakos,Tony]

Hi I'm Tony Chirakos, product manager of the WorldCat Registry at OCLC, and I wanted to thank everyone for the recent discussion and ask a few additional questions to help us continue to improve it.
In terms of WorldCat Registry and IP data curation, originally, the OCLC cooperative had hoped that the WorldCat Registry would solve the problem of maintaining IP ranges and then disseminating that data to vendors. Unfortunately, as people have noted, there hasn't been much usage or participation. Curating the IP data in the WorldCat Registry does have an impact with vendors that load content to the WorldCat knowledge base. However, since the IP ranges are part of the infrastructure of all the programs that use the WorldCat knowledge base, the contribution of well-maintained data is easy to overlook.
One of the issues the cooperative faces in curating IP data (and other institution data) for dissemination to vendors, is determining specifically how the data is used in vendor systems. For example, in OCLC systems, the IP Registry not only delivers a "Recognized" command to allow a minimal level of access to systems and services, but it also distributes other attributes (parameters) of the IP range: For example, OCLC Symbol, Authorization number, other product identification attributes, etc. These attributes of an IP range are used by the consuming systems for further credentialed authentication, usage statistics, and so forth. When OCLC delivers the IP ranges to a vendor, we don't know enough about what other attributes of the IP ranges the vendors would be interested in. This limits our ability, as curators of the data, to provide added value that might be of interest to vendors.
That being said, I'd really like to follow up with you, Ken, and any other interested parties, to discuss in detail the types of data associated with IP ranges that vendors are interested in, so we can make the system useful to the library community overall.
Institutional identity plays a central role in library infrastructure. As Peter Murray pointed out, the WorldCat Registry may be a hidden gem in OCLC's public services to the library community. I and OCLC are committed to making it the best it can be.

Sincerely,
Tony Chirakos
OCLC Data Services

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2014-02-18
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