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On October 13, Jeff Eller, Leslie McCall and I attended the OCLC 2015 Member Forum at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte.

Our first session was about resources and developments at OCLC presented by Meryl Cinnamon, OCLC Member Relations Liaison. Of particular interest was the development of an ILL cost calculator. Other links of interest included:

In addition to learning about OCLC products and developments, we had the opportunity to break into groups based on our roles in libraries and later on, our library “type” (academic v. public or special). I chose to attend the “FirstSearch and Discovery” session to see if I could learn how to better navigate the new WorldCat interface called WorldCat Discovery (formerly FirstSearch) to which ZSR recently migrated. As it turned out, many of the represented libraries now use WorldShare Management Services (WMS) which is OCLC’s Integrated Library System (ILS). I learned that the WMS interface does permit access to the MARC records for the OCLC record but the Discovery interface does not. I voiced my concern over the need for this additional information to facilitate research by some of our faculty members who have effectively used FirstSearch for many years. These sessions were productive in that many of the library representatives were frank in their feedback regarding OCLC services and were able to have their concerns heard by a high-level representative.

The last session of the day was led by Drew Borda, Vice President, Management and Customer Operations who spoke about the “purposeful” culture shift at OCLC with a focus on responsiveness and accountability.