Cataloguing the World Wide Web: CORC at Edinburgh University
| Published date | 01 September 2001 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/03055720010804195 |
| Pages | 76-80 |
| Date | 01 September 2001 |
| Author | Zena Mulligan,John MacColl |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
76 — VINE 124
Cataloguing the World
Wide Web: CORC at
Edinburgh University
by Zena Mulligan and John MacColl
This article exami nes Edinburgh Univ ersity
Library’s exper ience of using OCLC’s
Co-operative Onlin e Resource Catalog ue
(CORC). It discus ses the project phase of
CORC, its functionality, including automatic
metadata harves ting and its ability to map
between MARC and Dublin Core metadata
formats. It also looks at how CORC fits into
Edinburgh University Library’s policies
regarding web resources, highlighting benefits
and concerns associated with the sys tem.
Background
Having successfully operated the WorldCat co-
operative cataloguing model for many years OCLC
decided to explore using the same concept to ease
the burden and duplication of effort of individual
libraries organising, describing and presenting web
resources for their use rs.1 and 2 However, rathe r than
encourage libraries to add web resources to
WorldCat, OCLC decided to design a system
which would incorporate the benefits of co-
operative cataloguing with an automatic metadata
harvesting or extraction tool and the flexibility of
being able to map between multiple metadata
formats. The Co-operative Online Resource
Catalogue (CORC) was thus conceived as a co-
operative system which would also help to
automate the record creation process and allow
libraries to utilise different metadata schemes to
suit their requirements.3
OCLC sent out a call for participants to test out the
system in late 1998 and released the first version
of CORC early in 1999. Records were initially
loaded into the CORC database from OCLC’s
InterCat and NetFirst databases.4,5 Participants
were asked to commit 0.5 FTE to use the system to
search for, edi t and add new resources. T hey were
also encouraged to provide active feedback that
was used to develop the system with regular
releases over the period of the project. OCLC also
hosted a number of participants meetings to further
garner ideas about and problems encountered with
the system. During this period CORC was made
available free of charge to all participating institu-
tions.
How CORC works
CORC provides a ‘button’ link that can be dragged
from the system and dropped directly into the
user’s personal toolbar. The user simply clicks on
this button when viewing a site of interest on the
web browser and CORC automatically starts the
record creation process by harvesting metadata
from the HTML metatags. The user is taken
directly into CORC and presented with a ‘raw’
metadata record for the chosen web site. Alterna-
tively, it is possible to enter CORC through its
homepage, choose the record creation area and
paste in the URL of the site. Multiple records can
be created by this method; the user specifies the
URL of a site and also the number of links on that
site that they would like to create records for.
CORC then creates basic records for these sites
and informs the user when they are available for
editing.
Once inside the record creation process the editor
has acces s to the record and the web site i t de-
scribes, which is displayed on a lower frame of the
page. This permits the editor to refer to the web
site and edit the record accordingly. If preferred,
the whole screen can be dedicated to the record
and the Web site viewed on a separate browser
window. The automatically generated fields can be
edited using the normal cut-and-paste functions
and other fields are deleted and added as required
with the click of a button. In response to concern
from cataloguers, CORC added alternative editing
modes in addition to their original template op-
tions, which require browser interaction every time
a field is added or de leted. Catalogu ers felt this
made the editing process unacceptably slow, so a
text area was developed which allowed users to
edit records with fewer browser interactions,
therefore speeding up the process.
Sets of constant data can be created, stored and
used when editing a group of records displaying
significant similarities. Constant data can be
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