The OCLC Quilters, a group of current and retired OCLC employees, have spent months creating a quilt of 120 cross-cut blocks to donate to the silent auction held during the ALA 2026 Annual Conference. The ALA BiblioQuilters annually host this auction as a fundraiser for the Christopher Hoy Scholarship, which awards a $5,000 scholarship each year to a U.S./Canadian citizen or permanent resident who is pursuing an MLS in an ALA-accredited program.

This is the fourth year in a row that the OCLC Quilters have donated a quilt to the silent auction. Their work inspired me to take up sewing about a year ago, and I’m proud to move from admirer to participant, contributing to the OCLC quilt for the first time. Although left-handed people are about 10% of the population, three of the 13 people contributing to the OCLC quilt, including myself, are left-handed. While that doesn’t affect the result, it requires a few adjustments in technique and having the appropriate scissors. Sharing advice on adapting equipment and shopping for left-handed supplies is one of the ways we support each other.

Like all handicrafts, quilting is an activity with its own nomenclature. As a quilter and cataloger, I found myself wondering: “What controlled vocabulary terms could I use to describe the OCLC quilt?” There are several from vocabularies such as Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT). These are listed at the end of this blog.

A quilt is created from many elements that may not be individually significant but form a meaningful whole, just like a WorldCat bibliographic record. The blocks of the quilt function like data elements in a WorldCat record, with contributions from multiple individuals creating the larger work.

Assembling the quilt

OCLC quilters sewed 120 blocks, which are the fabric squares comprising the quilt’s front. The blocks are a cross-cut design—a pattern chosen because it is accessible for novice sewists and makes good use of small fabric pieces. Quilters often save these leftover pieces, called “scraps,” from other projects for future use. Reusing scraps makes quilting a sustainable craft, and quilters often share them with one another. An experienced OCLC quilter, who keeps her scrap collection organized in true librarian fashion, donated most of the fabric pieces used for the blocks.

Experienced quilters arranged and sewed the blocks together and cut the batting (soft material used between the front and back sides of the quilt). The next step, in which three layers are sewn together with a decorative stitch, is quilting. This is the strict definition of the term “quilting,” although it is often used to refer to the entire process of creating a quilt. The pattern used for the quilt stitching is called “modern ties,” and it looks a bit like tied shoelace loops.

The final step is to sew a long strip of binding fabric around the edges of the quilt, which will keep the ends from fraying as well as being decorative. Two labels were sewn into the binding: “Made in OH” and “Is it perfect? No.” Both of these labels are accurate descriptions of this quilt, but unlike in bibliographic descriptions, a certain amount of imperfection is not only tolerated but may be considered part of the quilt’s charm.

A quilting tradition at ALA Annual

The OCLC quilt will be one of many available at the ALA BiblioQuilters silent auction during ALA Annual in Chicago, Illinois. The BiblioQuilters were founded at the 1998 ALA Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. Since 2000, the BiblioQuilters have had a silent auction of quilts every year except 2020 and 2021 (because of the pandemic). The quilts are usually available to view and bid on near the registration area. If you are attending ALA in Chicago, I highly recommend you visit the auction table to view them. After ALA, you may be inspired to browse the shelves of your local public library for 746.46, the Dewey Decimal number for quilting.

Subject vocabulary terms

For those readers who appreciate quilting and metadata, the following controlled vocabulary terms reflect concepts discussed in this blog. You might even find it fun to match the concepts to the natural language descriptions!

Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus terms

batting

binding (textile material)

blocks (quilt components)

fabric scissors

quilting

Library of Congress Subject Heading terms

Quilting

Sewing—Left-handed techniques

Textile fabrics

The post 120 blocks, one story: The collective creation of the OCLC Quilt appeared first on Hanging Together.

At a recent gathering of the OCLC Leaders Council, something happened that I always hope for but never take for granted. Connections were being made, there was laughter, sidebar conversations over lunch and dinner, and a willingness to challenge each other’s ideas, honesty about what people were struggling with, and genuine curiosity about what others are doing. All of this was built on a foundation of trust that made these in-depth conversations possible.

These moments don’t happen automatically. In my experience, they take time—and often, the opportunity to meet in person. Meeting online can be very efficient, but it can feel rushed and impersonal—it’s hard to truly get to know each other through a screen. Being in the room together over the course of a few days, in a small enough group that you actually get to speak to everyone, creates a solid foundation for future opportunities to meet again, online or in person, to build on the connections, themes, and conversations that started there.

What made this gathering particularly significant was its global dimension. Library leaders do come together regularly, but often within their own region, or among peers from the same library type. Academic and public library leaders, for instance, don’t always get the opportunity to meet for in-depth conversation, even though there is much they can learn from each other. Conversations organized by library type or region have real value, of course, but there is something additional that comes with a broader perspective that is still rooted in the library ecosystem while extending beyond your usual network. Every perspective in the room adds something, regardless of what an institution has or hasn’t yet achieved. The value of these conversations comes from the range of experiences present.

OCLC Research has published work on building relationships across unit boundaries within institutions (social interoperability), as well as creating and sustaining successful multi-institutional collaborative partnerships. But what I’d like to talk about here is more fundamental—the foundation for building successful partnerships: global library leaders from a variety of backgrounds and experiences engaging with one another in the same room. Prompted by the recent Leaders Council meeting, here are some reflections on the practical realities of these conversations, intended to deepen understanding and maximize their effectiveness.

Same words, different realities

Across international leadership spaces, a remarkably consistent vocabulary tends to surface. Terms recur across sessions, regions, and formats, and their repetition signals that we are all on the same page: a reassurance that participants are engaged with the same broad challenges and moving in a broadly similar direction.

The problem is that shared language doesn’t necessarily mean a shared understanding or a shared reality. One of the things that becomes apparent, watching these conversations unfold, is how often the same word lands differently depending on who is in the room.

Take efficiency, a term that surfaces regularly in conversations about how libraries operate and plan strategically. In some contexts, efficiency encompasses decisions about workforce size and structure. In others, those decisions are shaped by employment frameworks that lead to a very different kind of conversation, shifting the focus instead toward technology, software, or finding different ways of working within existing structures. The word is the same. The need it describes, and the range of solutions available, are not. This is why you need a deeper understanding of each other’s context to find out where you are using the same words but aren’t speaking the same language.

Glimpses, not full pictures

Even with that understanding in place, international leadership conversations can only ever offer glimpses of each other’s reality rather than the full picture. You see enough of someone else’s context to recognize the challenge, but rarely enough to understand all the constraints behind it.

This matters because those constraints are often what make the difference. Take something many library leaders struggle with: making the case for their library’s value to the broader institution or community they serve (for more on this topic, see OCLC Research’s latest report!). Some leaders have, through long-term effort and considerable perseverance, managed to position the library as visibly central to their institution’s priorities and a key part of its success. For others, making that same case remains difficult. The reasons could be structural or personal: the physical or organizational distance between the library and the part of the institution that makes key decisions, the data available to demonstrate the library’s impact, or the library leader’s own position, voice, and access to the right conversations at the right time.

In international settings, what tends to surface is the success story. What is harder to showcase is the full path to that success. The years of lobbying, the hundreds of stakeholder conversations, the incremental steps that made this outcome possible. A leader who has achieved that recognition may share what they did in good faith and genuinely want to help others reach the same goal. But because the conditions that made their success possible are often invisible in how the story gets told, it can be hard for them to understand why the same challenge feels insurmountable to a peer.

The value outside of the program

International leadership meetings are often evaluated by what happens in the formal program. But some of the most valuable exchanges happen elsewhere. Recognizing that is part of understanding how these spaces work in practice.

In smaller gatherings, it’s the time outside the formal agenda where a lot of the magic happens. When a group of library leaders meet for the first time, they are still in the process of getting to know one another. This is why you can’t expect them to immediately share their biggest challenges or most acute pain points. There is a measure of trust building that happens as a gathering takes place, especially over multiple days. It’s often after the official program ends, and there is room for leaders to relax and reflect together (for example, during dinner or at the bar) that the more personal and complex topics get discussed.

That kind of conversation requires enough prior exchanges that people feel safe being a little vulnerable. Admitting that your library is struggling to secure its position, or that you haven’t found a way to make your value proposition tangible enough to institutional leadership or other stakeholders that control funding, is not something most people are willing to do in a room full of peers they’ve just met. It becomes possible when the group has had time to become something more than a collection of strangers.

This is one of the reasons smaller, sustained gatherings tend to produce a different quality of exchange than large conferences. It is also why the informal spaces within those gatherings deserve to be nurtured rather than left entirely to chance.

No neat resolutions needed

One expectation worth setting aside is that international leadership conversations should resolve into clear conclusions. They rarely do, and that is not a failure.

Conversations like these do not need to end in consensus or a neat step-by-step path forward. It’s often the process of sharing and reflecting on both differences and commonalities that provides the greatest benefit. It might be an idea you hear and want to incorporate in your own library. A perspective that’s truly new to you and makes you see a topic in a different way. Or simply the opportunity to take a subject that was discussed at surface level and deepen the conversation in future gatherings.

That is why continued engagement matters more than resolution. Understanding accumulates across multiple conversations, multiple gatherings, and sometimes multiple years. It cannot be compressed into a single meeting, however well designed. The friction and the moments of genuine surprise are part of the value. Smoothing those moments away or rushing toward consensus risks losing exactly what makes international exchange worthwhile.

Conclusion

International leadership spaces are often judged by the ideas they surface or the alignment they appear to produce. But their deeper value lies in the glimpses they offer into realities that are different from our own. Those glimpses don’t tell the full story of what other library leaders are experiencing, but taken together, they help form a better understanding of what experiences are out there.

When designed well and when opportunities for informal interactions are cultivated, global library leadership spaces create the conditions for the kinds of conversations that go deepest. Those conversations rarely happen on the agenda, but rather emerge when enough trust has been built that people are willing to be open and candid with one another. That is not something that happens automatically: it requires continued investment in bringing people together, and repeated exposure to each other’s contexts, experiences, and points of view over time. Trust is not built overnight.

The next post in this series takes a closer look at what global engagement actually involves beyond the conversation itself and why showing up, in every sense of the phrase, costs more for some than others.

The post Reading the room: What global library leadership conversations teach us appeared first on Hanging Together.

Ann joins OCLC at an important moment as OCLC Research advances Research Reimagined, a strategic effort to strengthen the relevance, visibility, and impact of our research for library leaders and their institutions. In her role, Ann will help connect research priorities to practical insights that support decision‑making across a rapidly changing library and higher education landscape. She will lead a team of research scientists and engineers focused on advancing the Research Reimagined strategy.

Ann brings more than a decade of experience leading research programs in higher education, with expertise in mixed methods research, research operations, and research communication. Most recently, she held senior leadership roles at Indiana University.

Her work has focused on building durable research services, guiding cross-functional teams, and helping researchers and administrators navigate change. Throughout her career, she has paired rigorous analysis with practical application.

Ann also brings a perspective shaped by close collaboration with researchers, research administrators, and campus leaders beyond the library. That experience informs how she thinks about the evolving roles libraries as institutions respond to changes in technology, AI-informed scholarly workflows, and research infrastructure. This perspective will be especially valuable as OCLC Research continues exploring future-focused questions facing libraries and higher education.

To help introduce Ann to the community, we asked her a few informal questions.

What drew you to this role at OCLC?

What attracted me was the opportunity to help connect research to the decisions library leaders are making today, while also contributing to longer-term thinking about where libraries are headed. In higher education, I’ve worked with researchers, administrators, and institutional leaders who rely on strong evidence and practical insights to guide strategy, services, and priorities.

I was especially excited by the chance to bring that experience to OCLC and support work that can have both immediate and lasting value for libraries. Research is most meaningful to me when it helps people navigate change, make informed decisions, and think differently about what comes next.

How do you think about “research insights”?

I tend to think about research insights through the lens of impact. I once asked a doctor about a medical test, and she explained that she would not order it because the result would not change the treatment plan. At first, I was a little disappointed because I was genuinely curious, but that idea stayed with me.

It became a useful way for me to think about research. I’m always asking whether the work can help inform decisions, shape action, or open up new possibilities. If the findings don’t create an opportunity to do something differently, it’s worth asking how we can make the research more purposeful and useful.

What are you most looking forward to as you get started?

I’m really looking forward to getting to know my team and connecting with colleagues across OCLC to understand their work, priorities, and how Research Insights can support them.

As a social networks scholar, I’ve always been interested in the connections between people and how relationships help ideas spread and grow. So much innovation comes from those informal networks, whether that is among coworkers, library partners, or the broader community. I’m excited to learn from those connections and help build on the momentum already underway with Research Reimagined.

Ann will be attending ALA at the end of June, and we look forward to introducing her to many of you there. Until then, please join us in welcoming her to OCLC Research.

The post Welcome Ann McCranie, Director of Research Insights appeared first on Hanging Together.

Recent discussions on the OCLC Research blog have explored how artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to reshape cataloging and metadata workflows, particularly in addressing backlogs and improving efficiency. Conversations like these, however, are often grounded in environments where English-language metadata dominates. Bringing in a Middle Eastern perspective, especially from Arabic-speaking libraries, introduces a different set of conditions shaped by multilingual practice, script diversity, and issues of representation.

Arabic metadata workflows are not edge cases. They represent everyday operational realities across academic, national, and public libraries in the region. As such, they provide a valuable lens through which to examine both the opportunities and the limits of AI in library systems, including the interplay between automated workflows and human oversight.

Arabic metadata as a multilingual workflow

Cataloging in many Middle Eastern libraries is inherently multilingual. Records are typically created in Arabic and English, and in some cases French. This creates a dual responsibility: maintaining consistency within each language while ensuring coherence across scripts.

Within OCLC cataloging environments such as Connexion client, this multilingualism is embedded in the bibliographic record structure. Arabic script fields are paired with romanized equivalents, following established transliteration standards such as ALA-LC. A single intellectual work may therefore exist in parallel representations that must remain aligned over time.

There are also technical considerations. Cataloging in Arabic depends on appropriate input methods, keyboard configurations, and support for non-Latin scripts within MARC environments. These infrastructural elements directly affect both efficiency and data quality.

Transliteration sits at the core of this workflow. While systems provide automated support, outputs frequently require manual correction. Arabic is highly context-sensitive, and small variations in spelling can significantly alter meaning.

Transliteration remains a strong candidate for improvement. Current approaches are largely rule-based. AI models, especially those trained on high-quality bilingual corpora, could offer more context-sensitive transliteration suggestions. However, these would still require validation, reinforcing the need for human oversight.

Discovery expectations and normalization practices

On the discovery side, user expectations introduce an additional layer of complexity. Arabic users expect search systems to handle orthographic variation seamlessly, without requiring precise input.

Recent enhancements in WorldCat Discovery illustrate how this is achieved through rule-based normalization. These include treating diacritics and non-diacritics as equivalent, normalizing character variants (such as different forms of alef), handling prefixes like “ال”, and ignoring elongation characters. Sorting rules are also adapted to reflect Arabic linguistic conventions.

What appears as simple search functionality is underpinned by carefully designed and tested normalization rules. These are deterministic and transparent, refined over time based on real usage patterns.

This is an important benchmark for AI. Any AI-driven approach to metadata creation or discovery must match or exceed this level of linguistic precision. Moreover, AI could extend normalization into cataloging workflows. While discovery systems normalize at query time, catalog records themselves often retain inconsistencies, particularly in legacy data. Machine learning models could assist in identifying and aligning variant forms across large datasets.

From local workflows to shared discovery infrastructures

A broader shift is also taking place in how Arabic collections are positioned within global discovery systems. Aggregated discovery initiatives, such as shared Arabic-language catalogs built on WorldCat infrastructure, reflect a move away from isolated local systems toward more integrated and visible ecosystems.

Field discussions with libraries across the Middle East point to a consistent concern: the global visibility of Arabic scholarship. Fragmentation in discovery and inconsistencies in metadata continue to limit access and representation.

From a strategic perspective, this aligns with broader discussions on the “collective collection” and the role of shared infrastructure in improving resource discovery. AI, when combined with such infrastructure, could help improve metadata consistency at scale and support cross-institutional alignment.

Risks and limitations

Despite these opportunities, the use of AI in Arabic metadata workflows raises several important concerns:

• Language bias remains a significant issue. Many AI models are trained predominantly on English-language data, leading to uneven performance in Arabic. This reflects broader critiques of AI systems as reproducing existing linguistic and cultural imbalances.
• Transliteration introduces additional risks. While rule-based systems are predictable, AI-driven approaches may produce variable outputs that are harder to standardize. This variability can undermine authority control and consistency.
• There is also the risk of losing semantic nuance. Arabic names and terms often carry cultural and contextual meanings that may not be captured by automated systems.
• Normalization itself must be approached carefully. Rule-based normalization is controlled and transparent. AI systems, by contrast, may over-normalize, removing distinctions that are meaningful within the data.

Shared implications for AI implementations and professional practice

Arabic metadata workflows reinforce several broader insights that emerged from OCLC Research’s earlier examination of AI and metadata management.

First, hybrid models are likely to be the most effective. AI can improve efficiency and scalability, but it does not replace the need for professional expertise. Human validation remains essential, particularly in linguistically complex environments. The earlier OCLC Research findings corroborate this, noting “the importance of designing AI implementations as enhancements to human expertise rather than replacements, ensuring that professional development pathways remain robust while leveraging AI’s potential to handle volume and routine tasks.”

Second, there is a need to move beyond English-centric assumptions in system design. Supporting multilingual knowledge infrastructures requires deeper engagement with linguistic diversity at the level of data, standards, and workflows. Again, this observation from Arabic metadata workflows finds a parallel with our earlier findings, which emphasize that “AI systems often lack the deep contextual understanding needed for community-specific terminology or cultural nuances that don’t appear in general training databases.”

Third, metadata enrichment is an area of growing interest. Many Arabic collections lack detailed subject metadata. AI could support the generation of subject headings, summaries, and keywords in Arabic. Our earlier findings also noted the opportunity AI affords for metadata enrichment: for example, institutional repository deposit processes “often fail to supply complete and accurate metadata because students and researchers find metadata creation burdensome and time-consuming.” AI-powered support in areas like subject heading suggestion or automated abstract generation can help close that gap.

Fourth, AI could contribute to backlog reduction by generating draft records or recommendations. This use case was also highlighted in OCLC Research’s earlier findings on AI and metadata workflows: “AI-generated brief records for these materials can enable them to appear in discovery systems earlier, accelerating the process of making hidden collections discoverable and supporting local inventory control. This approach addresses the immediate need for discovery while allowing records to be completed, enriched, or refined over time.”

Arabic metadata workflows present unique features that differ from English language-based systems, which in turn impact specific use cases for AI implementations. Yet as the preceding examples illustrate, there is also general perspective regarding AI-powered metadata workflows that applies equally to Arabic and non-Arabic systems alike. Perhaps most important is the observation that in considering AI implementations, the goal is augmentation rather than replacement, supporting catalogers in focusing their expertise where it adds the most value. There is a tendency in current debates to frame AI adoption as a binary choice between automation and professional control. But this framing is limiting. AI is more usefully understood as part of a continuum of human–machine collaboration, where the question is not just whether to use AI, but how, where, and under what constraints.

Looking ahead

A pragmatic approach is emerging across libraries in the Middle East. Institutions are exploring targeted AI applications, particularly in normalization, enrichment, and transliteration, while maintaining strong human oversight.

There is also an opportunity for collective action. Improving Arabic-language training datasets, strengthening authority control frameworks, and promoting collaboration across institutions will be critical for making AI effective in this space.

Developments in systems such as Connexion and WorldCat Discovery show that progress is already underway. AI can accelerate this work, but only if it is grounded in real workflows and informed by linguistic and cultural expertise.

Ultimately, this is not only a question of efficiency. It is a question of representation. Ensuring that Arabic knowledge is accurately described and fully visible within global discovery systems remains a central challenge and a meaningful test of how inclusive our infrastructures truly are.

The post No edge case: Understanding AI opportunities through Arabic metadata workflows appeared first on Hanging Together.

Having recently released a Data Insights briefing on the Italian presence in the global published record, I’m inspired to introduce our latest OCLC Research report with a quote from Machiavelli:

Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration. (Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince)

What’s the connection? Read on …

Our new report, The Library Beyond the Library: Recasting the Library Value Proposition for Visibility and Impact, begins with the observation that academic libraries are taking on important new roles throughout the research lifecycle: from publishing, to research data management, to impact assessment. In doing so, their value proposition to the rest of the institution is evolving, and at the same time, becoming more complex and potentially more opaque to campus stakeholders.

Libraries have a long-standing, well-understood value proposition centered around collections—a perception that has persisted even as libraries have developed new offerings across a wide range of emerging areas of research support. Fixed ideas about library roles and impact create a challenge: despite significant library investments, institutional stakeholders often don’t understand, recognize, or are simply unaware of library service offerings in these new areas. Instead, the traditional collections-centric view of the library endures.

Collection stewardship remains a vital aspect of the library mission, but increasingly, academic libraries face a disconnect between their evolving services and institutional perceptions. As Machiavelli observes, appearances often overshadow reality. Academic libraries offer valuable capacities and expertise well-calibrated to meet institutional research needs and priorities, but the perception that library impact is limited to its traditional role of collections steward will nonetheless prevail if nothing is done to correct it.

This has real consequences. Perceptions of the library’s value proposition based on fixed ideas of its role and impact make it difficult for the true scope of library capacities and expertise—the “reality”, as Machiavelli expressed it—to filter through to institutional stakeholders. This makes it hard for the library to get a seat at the table for institution-wide discussions and policy-making on topics like data governance, research metrics, or open research practices; moreover, it can lead to diminished influence, and ultimately, reduced funding.  

This is a challenge, but also an opportunity for libraries to clarify their continued relevance to the institutional research enterprise. And that brings us back to OCLC Research’s new report, The Library Beyond the Library: Recasting the Library Value Proposition for Visibility and Impact. Based on in-depth interviews with international research library leaders, desk research, and accumulated insights from our previous studies of research support services, The Library Beyond the Library helps libraries navigate these trends by providing a framework and insights that support strategic planning aimed at elevating the library’s visibility and impact within its parent institution.

While the report findings were derived in the context of research support services in academic libraries, we believe they apply equally to many other areas of strategic importance to academic libraries, such as institutional priorities for student success, as well as to public and other types of libraries.

What do we mean by “the library beyond the library”? It’s an operational principle that emphasizes engagement “beyond the library” with the broader institutional environment, in support of the institutional research and learning mission. In our report, we argue that this operational principle increasingly shapes libraries’ ability to fulfill their mission, retain influence, and demonstrate impact and value.

The library beyond the library principle focuses on engagement through three channels:

• Strategic Alignment—Aligning library priorities with institutional goals
• Collaboration—Partnering with other institutional units to advance shared priorities
• Storytelling—Communicating the library’s evolving value proposition to stakeholders

These channels of engagement translate into important strategic questions for libraries:

• How can library services and expertise support, or in some cases evolve in response to, institutional priorities?
• What partnership opportunities exist with other institutional units, and how can libraries structure them effectively?
• How can libraries construct and communicate compelling narratives about their evolving value and impact to stakeholders?

The reality of the academic library on campus has expanded well beyond its traditional role of collections steward, but its appearance to many stakeholders—its perceived value proposition—often has not kept pace. This creates risks, because visibility combined with a clear stakeholder understanding of impact drives influence, inclusion in institutional decision-making, and funding.

“The library beyond the library“ is not a slogan, but a practical response to mitigate these risks as part of a process of updating and communicating the library’s evolving value proposition. By investing in intentional strategic action across all three framework channels—strategic alignment (tying services and expertise to institutional priorities), collaboration (building relationships and shared commitments with key units), and storytelling (making impact clear to stakeholders)—the library can demonstrate it is and will continue to be a dynamic partner in shaping the future of scholarship and research at its parent institution.

We invite you to read the Library Beyond the Library report and consider how you might use the framework at your institution to assess current services and expertise, identify cross-institutional partnership opportunities that showcase library capacities, and reimagine narratives about the library value proposition.

The post New OCLC Research Report: The Library Beyond the Library appeared first on Hanging Together.

I would guess that most people would conjure up something similar if asked to mentally visualize collaboration: a group of people, in the same physical space, working together. Direct, face-to-face collaboration is indeed an important way to partner and act collectively. But for libraries, another form of collaboration may be at least as important—and impactful. It is rooted in the concept of a collective collection: “the combined holdings of a group of libraries, analyzed and possibly managed as a unified resource.”

OCLC Research has produced a considerable body of work focused on defining, describing, and thinking through the implications of collective collections. An important strand of these studies examines collective collections in the context of shared print collections, in which groups of libraries work collaboratively to steward their collective print holdings. Most recently, we released the OCLC Research report Making Shared Print Work, which gathers community insight on workflows, data, and tools supporting collective stewardship of print collections, along with perceived gaps and opportunities that, if addressed, could strengthen the future of shared print programs. This report is part of OCLC Research’s Stewarding the Collective Collection project.

Shared data powers informational collaboration

One finding we reported in the study was that, as a practical matter, many shared print collections are distributed across a network of local collections, rather than physically consolidated into one collection. Aggregation of these local collections into a collective collection occurs through a layer of data and services that sits over the distributed collections, knitting them together into a data construct and allowing them to be analyzed and managed as a cohesive whole.

A related finding from Making Shared Print Work is that data is the key to delivering value to shared print programs:

Accurate and comprehensive data is essential for effective stewardship of collective collections, such as those managed by shared print programs. Monographic shared print programs involve six core workflow categories, with collection analysis, metadata management, and verification being the most data-driven—and in some cases, the most time-intensive—activities. The importance of data to shared print workflows is amplified by the fact that these programs primarily operate as distributed collections, requiring extensive coordination of holdings, retention, and bibliographic data across multiple partner libraries. (p. 7)

In these circumstances, it is not necessarily collaborators seated in the same room that drive successful shared print partnerships, but rather, informational collaboration: collective action powered by shared information that informs local and group decision-making.

The importance of informational collaboration was reinforced again and again in our Making Shared Print Work study. The perspective we gathered from interviews and focus groups revealed the primacy of data-driven workflows in shared print programs, underscoring the role of data as the connective tissue linking distributed local collections into an overarching collective collection. Case in point: the most frequently mentioned shared print workflow by our interviews was collection analysis.

Collection analysis, at its core, is about turning bibliographic and holdings data into actionable insights. Detailed knowledge of the size, scope, and salient features of a library collection—or a collective collection—leads to informed decision-making across a wide range of stewardship activities: from weeding and storage planning, to ensuring the fit and relevance of the collection to user needs, to redressing gaps in representation and diversity in legacy holdings. To this, we can add a number of shared print-specific considerations, such as choosing to make print retention commitments within the local collection or even identifying rare or last copies of publications within the context of a group’s collective print holdings.

Informational collaboration through collection analysis

Informational collaboration fuels this type of data-driven collection analysis in a shared print context. Sharing data about local collections in the partnership builds a clearer picture of collective print holdings, which, in turn, allows for better informed decision-making at the group level, but also at the local level, where knowledge of the size, scope, and features of the collective collection provides a contextual backdrop against which local decisions can be made.

Retention commitments are a great example of how this works in practice. A recent OCLC Research study examined print retention commitments registered in OCLC’s WorldCat database. A retention commitment—an assurance that a library will continue to retain and steward a particular print volume in its collection—is vital intelligence that informs the local retention decisions of other libraries. Informational collaboration occurs when the retention commitment is registered in WorldCat: when this information is shared and analyzed across a group of libraries, each can make local de-accessioning decisions based on the assurance that at least one copy of the publication will remain available.

Data-driven analysis supported by informational collaboration helps libraries keep books in collections as well. The Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) launched a pilot shared print program in 2016. A group-wide analysis of collective print holdings, produced using OCLC’s GreenGlass collection analysis tool, revealed the surprisingly low rate of overlap across the partner collections, with a large percentage of the collective collection consisting of publications held by only one or two member libraries. Informational collaboration in the form of sharing information about local print holdings through the GreenGlass analysis led to actionable intelligence for the group members: knowledge of the high incidence of rare or unique holdings within the group informed and optimized group-wide retention commitment strategies.

The importance of informational collaboration through collection analysis and other forms of data-driven analysis was underlined further in our Making Shared Print Work study when interviewees indicated that more was needed within shared print programs and beyond. For example, practitioners we spoke to noted a lack of systematic coordination across shared print programs, resulting in inefficiencies and duplication of effort that only become evident when the full landscape of shared print collections is taken into account. More sharing of data across shared print programs—in other words, more informational collaboration—could improve decision-making and coordination of resource allocations across the full spectrum of collective print stewardship efforts.

Data and tools are collaborative infrastructure

Collaboration requires collaborative infrastructure, the scaffolding upon which partnership can be established, sustained, and encouraged to thrive. For face-to-face collaboration—people working together in the same room—collaborative infrastructure might take the form of meeting spaces, committees, governance policies, and so forth.

Collaborative infrastructure is also needed for informational collaboration, but the nature of that infrastructure is different: databases, data exchange mechanisms, and data analysis tools that create the actionable intelligence that informs local and collective decision-making. Think of WorldCat, a database of shared information about library collections around the world. Consider also analysis tools like OCLC’s GreenGlass and Choreo Insights. Taken together, these resources—data and tools—create opportunities for informational collaboration in shared print and beyond.

Shared print programs illustrate how collaboration in libraries increasingly depends on informational collaboration that links distributed local collections into a collective collection through shared data and services. The infrastructure needed to support informational collaboration, like databases and analytic tools, complements the data-driven workflows that support shared print as well as other forms of collection stewardship. Informational collaboration provides the foundation for successful, sustained partnerships that help libraries achieve greater efficiencies and impact through scale.

The post Data-driven workflows and the art of informational collaboration appeared first on Hanging Together.

Funding and resourcing, technology, staffing, community needs and expectations—the pace of change library leaders now need to navigate and lead their organizations through is nothing short of breathtaking. Trends that took years to evolve now demand responses and strategic planning within months, or even days. Grounding those choices in rigorous, in-depth research remains essential.

At the same time, library decision-makers benefit from collective wisdom and insights shared among peers. Knowing how others are responding to similar pressures can help leaders calibrate their strategies and avoid reinventing the wheel. When those insights are confined to personal or regional networks, the limited perspective can restrict leaders’ views of how priorities and decisions are shifting.

OCLC Research leadership insights: Real-time insight for real-world decisions

This tension between the need for deeply researched guidance and the demand for timely, real-world insight creates a gap for the field. Library leaders need to understand not only which frameworks and models exist for long-term decision-making that are supported by our traditional research efforts, but also how their peers are responding to rapidly changing conditions right now.

To help fill this gap, OCLC Research is expanding its approach to gathering and sharing knowledge with a new series of pulse surveys focused on library leadership priorities. These quick, timely surveys aim to gather information on the decisions library leaders are making on a variety of critical topics shaping the future of librarianship.

A complementary approach to longstanding research practices

These short surveys are designed to capture high-level snapshots of the decisions library leaders make in the moment on subjects critical to the field, such as community engagement tactics and the use and implementation of new technologies, including AI. They are intentionally brief, both to respect leaders’ time and to enable us to respond quickly to emerging issues.

This approach does not replace the in-depth, foundational research OCLC Research is known for. Rather, it adds another dimension to it.

Our long-form research projects will continue to provide thoughtful frameworks, deep analysis, and foundational guidance for operational decision-making and long-term innovation. Leadership insights surveys complement that work by:

• Broadening the range of topics we can address, especially those that are evolving quickly
• Expanding the pool of voices contributing insight, drawing from library leaders across regions and library types
• Capturing change as it happens, and tracking how priorities and decisions shift over time

Together, these approaches create a more layered understanding of the field, combining depth with immediacy.

Powered by OCLC’s global membership network

The value of these leadership insights depends on scale. OCLC is uniquely positioned to engage a broad, global network of libraries and library leaders representing diverse viewpoints. This allows us not only to collect perspectives from beyond individual professional networks but also to share results with the field quickly and widely.

The outcomes will be intentionally concise: scannable, easy-to-digest summaries that surface patterns, contrasts, and emerging directions. Think of them as snapshots—ephemeral by design—that help illuminate how decisions are being made today, while also building a record of how those decisions evolve over time.

What this means for library leaders

For library leadership, this new format offers another way to stay oriented in a fast-moving environment:

• Insight into how peers are prioritizing and responding to shared challenges
• Timely information that can inform near-term decisions
• A broader field-level perspective that complements local experience

By adding pulse surveys to our toolkit, OCLC Research is expanding the breadth and increasing the pace of the insights we provide, while remaining grounded in the thoughtful, evidence-based work that has long supported libraries’ strategic and operational decision-making.

We see this as one more way to help library leaders make sense of complexity, learn from one another, and move forward with confidence. Our first pulse survey, focused on AI innovation & culture in libraries, will be fielded with US library leaders in early March 2026.

Subscribe to Hanging Together, the blog of OCLC Research, for updates on the survey series and to follow our latest work.

The post Listening to library leaders: Surveys capture real-time perspectives shaping decisions across the field appeared first on Hanging Together.

“Ghost kitchens” are pop-up restaurants geared entirely toward food delivery. They typically rent space in traditional restaurants to prepare food, take orders online, and deliver them to the doorstep via delivery apps like DoorDash or Uber Eats. Ghost kitchens proliferated during the COVID pandemic, which for a time practically extinguished dine-in food service. Restaurants of all descriptions needed to restructure their operations to scale up food delivery as their main service model; ghost kitchens were the extreme example, with the entire service model built around delivery.

The story of ghost kitchens is one of a specific business sector—restaurants—retooling traditional operational structures and service models to meet changing conditions in the marketplace. Gary Pearce, Director, Academic Services in the Monash University Library, touched on a similar theme in a recent OCLC Research Library Partnership webinar, describing how the Library reimagined its operational and service models to scale up research support capacities and better address institutional needs and priorities. As with ghost kitchens, Monash sought to reimagine its services in response to changing imperatives—specifically, the need to deliver research support at scale, within the confines of prevailing budgetary limitations. This situation will surely resonate with other research libraries, and there is much to be learned from Monash’s experiences and innovative solutions.

Retooling operational structures and service models

Academic Services is one of three portfolios at Monash University Library. To address the need to scale research support services and align more closely with stakeholder needs, Academic Services shifted from a traditional liaison librarian model organized on disciplinary lines to a functional specialization approach based on library expertise. This change moved away from multiple teams providing duplicate services to specific disciplines, in favor of agile, project-based service teams that work across disciplines.

A key aspect of Monash’s approach is the creation of a new Library Business Partner role, whose chief responsibility is strategic relationship management with senior leadership in a specific academic area. The Library Business Partner serves as a conduit for two-way communication between the Library and its academic stakeholders: on the one hand, communicating library messaging to the academic unit, and on the other, gathering intelligence and feedback on the unit’s needs and mobilizing capacity within the Library’s service teams to address them.

Pearce provided a rich description of how this retooling of operational structures and service models was conceived and implemented. Here are a few of the themes that emerged from his discussion:

• Acknowledging relationship management as a dedicated role: A key innovation was the creation of the Library Business Partner role to manage outreach and engagement with academic units. The Library Business Partner represents the entire Library and therefore can provide a comprehensive view of Library capacities, as well as expedite responses to stakeholder needs. Separating relationship management from service delivery facilitated a shift from a reactive, transactional model to a more proactive, two-way partnership.
• Emphasizing a culture of agility: Building a service model that was both scalable and responsive led Monash to adopt an agile approach. Academic Services implemented a matrix organizational structure in which staff have fixed reporting lines with flexible membership across multiple service teams—including research support. Staff have the option to rotate across teams to deepen expertise and experience. Work is divided between “business as usual” work and project work, the latter of which can be scaled up or down as needs and resource availability dictate. While this new operational structure could pose challenges to long-standing professional identities tied to traditional service models, it also opens up new pathways to leverage existing areas of expertise and develop new ones.
• Close attention to change management: The new operational structures were a significant departure from previous models. In recognition of this, the development and implementation processes were characterized by consultation, transparency, and communication, including a series of consultative visits to peer institutions facing similar challenges in adapting service development and delivery; presentations to stakeholder groups; regular updates to staff, along with clear milestones and timelines; open channels for questions and feedback; and planning for professional development needs.     

These are just some of the key themes that provide the foundation for Monash Library’s story of transformation, scalability, and responsiveness.

Managing implementation is crucial

Pearce’s presentation elicited many questions from the audience in attendance. Collectively, the questions reflected a keen interest in the implementation aspect of the shift to new operational structures and service models, touching on issues like:

• Stakeholder response and buy-in: how researchers and staff reacted to service model changes; channels for communication and feedback
• Staffing implications: impact of restructuring on staffing counts; work allocations between “business as usual work” and project work; cross-training opportunities
• Strategic relationship management: interest in the details of how the new Library Business Partner role works in practice

The audience’s interest in these topics highlight that a shift from a traditional/subject-focused service model to a functional/specialization model requires attention to both structural innovation and the staffing and stakeholder reactions to significant organizational change.

Additional reading

Pearce’s webinar intersects with several OCLC Research studies that complement some of the themes from the emerging from the service model transformation experience. First, check out our work on social interoperability, which we define as the creation and maintenance of working relationships between individuals and organizational units within an institution. Our report describes strategies and tactics that can help strengthen social interoperability skills—an essential element of roles like Monash’s Library Business Partner. In addition, OCLC Research’s forthcoming work on the Library Beyond the Library—an operational principle that emphasizes the importance of the library engaging with the broader institutional environment through strategic alignment, collaboration, and storytelling—connects with Monash’s ambitions to retool its service model to better align with institutional research needs and priorities.

Ready to dive deeper? Listen to the full recording

The webinar and subsequent Q&A offered a richly informative look behind the scenes of a major shift in operational structures and service models to better address the needs of stakeholders. If you didn’t have a chance to join us for the live webinar, please take some time to view the recording. Many thanks to Gary Pearce for sharing his perspective with all of us!

The post Scaling research support at Monash University Library appeared first on Hanging Together.

Many libraries and archives are homes for oral history programs. Oral histories add voice, personality, richness, and depth, and are a natural complement to other types of collections. While these narratives can bring significant value to collections, supporting oral history production can present special challenges. Oral history programs can be composed of complex, multi-stage projects that require thoughtful planning, coordination, and even innovative approaches to capture, preserve, and make accessible valuable cultural and historical narratives.

In a Works in Progress webinar hosted by the OCLC Research Library Partnership (RLP) on 21 October 2025, practitioners from the University of Washington and Montana State University shared their experiences developing and implementing effective oral history program workflows, which now includes best practices for balancing human expertise with emerging AI technologies.

Conor Casey, Head of the Labor Archives of Washington at University of Washington Libraries Special Collections, shared his experiences based on over 13 years of evolved practices with collaborative workflows and scalable project management. The Montana State University team—Jodi Allison-Bunnell, Head of Archives and Special Collections; Emily O’Brien, Metadata and Mendery Specialist; and Taylor Boyd, Metadata & Collection Support Technician—discussed their experiments using two different tools to generate oral history abstracts.

This blog post summarizes the webinar’s key insights, but you can watch the full recording right here.

The Labor Archives of Washington: Shared stewardship in practice

The Labor Archives of Washington, founded in 2010 as a partnership between the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies and UW Libraries Special Collections, demonstrates how community-founded archives can scale oral history programs through strategic collaboration. Despite never having more than two full-time staff members (who also have other duties and responsibilities), the archive has completed close to 200 interviews across multiple projects by leveraging a collaborative model that designates clear roles for all players.

Scaling through partnership and project management

Conor Casey emphasized that success stems from recognizing institutional strengths and distributing work accordingly. The archive provides infrastructure, tools, and preservation expertise; community partners bring connections to narrators, scholarly expertise, and cultural knowledge essential for developing interview questions that are meaningful within the user base.

The Labor Archive’s workflow success relies on project management tools, including Asana templates, Google Drive file management, and comprehensive documentation. As an example of how documentation and project management tools work to ensure a smooth experience, Casey stressed the importance of “baking in” permissions, requiring signed release forms from participants before embarking on a project to enable stewardship of a given collection. These tools also ensure quality and consistency in metadata.

Ensuring that all parties are on the same page is also vitally important. Casey advised that clear roles and deadlines to keep the project on track, and that project charters or MOUs can be very helpful when collaborating between organizations and with multiple parties, even within organizations.

Even with AI promise, transcription remains a human-centered activity

Beginning in 2018, the Labor Archives began experimenting with AI-aided transcription using tools like Otter.ai, Maestra, and Descript. These tools are not one-size-fits-all solutions and depend heavily on project needs. When AI is employed, Casey’s workflow diagrams revealed a crucial insight: human intervention appears at nearly every stage of the AI-aided process.

Despite the promise of AI in some cases, a professional transcriptionist is still faster and more accurate for certain projects. “Professional transcribers may still be more efficient than just AI,” Casey noted. “You are still going to have to do a lot of work to correct, tag, and conform AI to transcription style guides.”

Accessibility is core to mission

Casey also discussed the implementation of many accessibility features, such as including transcriptions and captioned media for all interviews. Casey positioned accessibility not as an add-on compliance requirement, but as central to the archival mission. The archive proactively implemented transcription and captioning before Washington State’s 2017 mandate for all new online projects, viewing these activities as extensions of intellectual access rather than a burden.

Montana State University: AI to support accessibility needs

The Montana State University team faced a specific challenge: creating abstracts for approximately 350 oral history recordings in their Trout and Salmonid collection to meet ADA Title II accessibility requirements. The MSU library staff were very much encouraged by leadership to embark on a journey of learning around AI tools, so experimenting with tools to learn (and employing exploration and curiosity along the way) was a natural step for the team and the framework for their presentation and discussion overall.

These field recordings from around the world presented unique challenges, including:

• Multilingual interviews conducted with interpreters
• Variable field recording quality
• Videos that had been edited to include interviewer questions only on text intertitles

Jodi Allison-Bunnell spoke about using Claude.ai to generate 200-word abstracts from full transcripts produced in Trint. The team found that Claude generally produced coherent abstracts. However, several limitations emerged:

• Missing context: Because interviewer questions were only shown on intertitle slides, Claude struggled to provide complete context
• Factual error: If proper names and technical terms were incorrect in the transcript, they were also in the abstract; the transcript had to be thoroughly reviewed to avoid promulgating errors
• Over-inference: When given insufficient content, Claude would sometimes infer more about subjects than was supported by the source material and required a human with good knowledge of the transcript to intercept and correct the imbalance

The cataloger perspective: Quality and workflow integration

Emily O’Brien and Taylor Boyd assessed the abstracts from a metadata creation standpoint, focusing on whether AI-generated abstracts contained sufficient information for accurate cataloging without requiring catalogers to repeat work.

For this specific use case, Trint consistently outperformed Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT. However, caution should be applied before declaring a clear and persistent winner in an area where tools and technology are evolving quickly. The team found that Claude abstracts generated months apart showed significant quality differences; this finding demonstrates that it is difficult to make static judgments about tools in this quickly evolving space.

O’Brien and Boyd also emphasized a vital point in assessing the accuracy and efficacy of AI-generated abstracts that will support metadata creation: unless AI-assisted humans have prior learned experience with creating abstract-level metadata, they make lack the ability to assess the quality of AI outputs.

Despite limitations, the team found significant time savings. Reading a transcript and writing an abstract from scratch took, on average, 1-2 hours, while reading a transcript, running it through Claude or Trint, and assessing and correcting the result took an average of 30 minutes. However, Allison-Bunnell also highlighted the need to maintain oversight over tools (including changes in terms of service) and to budget time to review workflows that might be impacted by those changes, as well as to develop, implement, and review AI use policies on an ongoing basis. Ultimately, time savings may be shifted across positions in ways that aren’t initially evident.

Lessons learned and workflow implications

Both presentations emphasized that effective workflows supported by AI require human oversight at multiple stages. The Labor Archives workflows reflect human intervention points throughout the process, while the Montana State team stressed that professional experience in the relevant domain is essential before AI tools can be effectively evaluated or implemented.

Successful oral history workflows cannot be separated from organizational context, resources, and mission. The Labor Archives’ collaborative model works because of their community-focused mission and partnership infrastructure. Montana State’s approach is grounded in their need to meet specific accessibility requirements and also in their deep collection strengths supported by corresponding curatorial and community knowledge. Both institutions demonstrated how accessibility considerations drive innovation rather than constrain it.

Looking forward

These presentations illustrated that effective oral history workflows require thoughtful integration of human expertise, technology, and collaborative partnerships. AI tools can enhance efficiency and accessibility, but they work best when implemented with a clear understanding of their limitations and within robust frameworks that center human knowledge.

The key insight across both presentations was that technology should amplify human-centered values and good project design, not replace them. Successful oral history programs leverage innovation in service of their core mission: preserving and providing access to irreplaceable cultural narratives. These presentations demonstrate the value of taking a stance of curiosity, exploring, and sharing our experiments and lessons learned as we navigate the integration of new technologies with traditional archival practice. We would love to hear about your experiments in this area!

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Special thanks to Conor Casey, Jodi Allison-Bunnell, Emily O’Brien, and Taylor Boyd for generously sharing their insights and experiences. For more resources on oral history workflows, including templates and project management tools, view the slides and watch the full webinar recording from the event page.

The post Building effective workflows for oral history projects: Collaboration, structure, and AI innovation appeared first on Hanging Together.

Metamorphoses

The myth of King Lycaon is not the earliest werewolf story but is an important exemplar of the wolf transformation being used as a punishment. In Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid describes how the god Jupiter transformed Lycaon into a wolf as a punishment for attempting to trick the disguised Jupiter into eating human flesh. Several 16th-century editions of Metamorphoses include illustrations of this myth, but one of the best may be from an incomplete project by Dutch engraver Henrick Goltzius to provide 300 illustrations for Metamorphoses. Fifty-Two Engravings Illustrating Ovid’s Metamorphosis contains illustrations he completed, including one depicting the Lycaon myth. For readers who love etymology, yes, there is a connection between King Lycaon’s name and lycanthrope. The word lycanthrope derives from two Greek words: λύκος (wolf) and ἄνθρωπος (man).

The Phantom Ship

Most werewolves in stories were male until the 1839 publication of Frederick Marryat’s Gothic novel The Phantom Ship, which is available to read online at HathiTrust. In chapter 39, the character Hermann Krantz tells a story about a mysterious woman named Christina who married his father and they discovered could transform into a white wolf. It is noteworthy that Christina came from Transylvania, which would be the setting of the 1897 novel Dracula. This chapter has been published as a short story called “The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains” in anthologies such as Terrifying Transformations: an Anthology of Victorian Werewolf Fiction, 1838-1896.

This is a horror story with Christina beating her stepchildren in her human form and killing Krantz’s siblings in her wolf form. Like many supernatural creatures described in Gothic fiction, the female werewolf in The Phantom Ship is evil rather than the complex depictions of cursed humans in later literature.

While The Phantom Ship lacks the popularity of other Gothic novels like Dracula and Frankenstein, the contribution of the female werewolf character paved the way for another female werewolf in my favorite modern werewolf story, Bitten by Kelley Armstrong. The novel’s main character is Elena Michaels, the only known female werewolf. Elena struggles to reconcile her human and werewolf sides in this novel and its sequels. I don’t want to spoil the story for those of you interested in reading the novel, so I’ll just say that Elena stands out in the pack.

Teen Wolf

The motion picture Teen Wolf, directed by Rod Daniel and starring Michael J. Fox, may not be a horror film classic, but this coming-of-age comedy provides a bold twist to the typical werewolf story. High school student Scott Howard’s lycanthropy is an asset instead of a curse. As a werewolf, Howard uses his superior athletic abilities to help his basketball team win games, and he becomes very popular. With popularity comes arrogance, and thus Howard learns to be himself and work with his teammates. As a child of the 80s, I remember this film fondly for its simplistic storytelling. Also, unlike other supernatural movies from the same time period, this movie never gave me nightmares.

There is something for everyone in werewolf stories—horror, comedy, bildungsroman, and paranormal romance. If your Halloween plans are not already made, consider enjoying a good werewolf tale. Happy Halloween!

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