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The Research Advisory Committee (RAC) met with Office of Research staff for the first of its 1997 meetings in Dublin, Ohio, on Feb. 10-11. Two new members of RAC were present, Edward A. Fox, associate director for research, Computing Center, and professor of computer science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and Bernard Hurley, director of access services, the University of California at Berkeley Library, and director, Northern Regional Library Facility, University of California. They were joined by continuing member Joseph Hardin, associate director, Software Development Group, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

After welcomes by Terry Noreault, director of the Office of Research and Special Projects, and Donald J. Muccino, vice president and chief operating officer, which included updates on the current status of OCLC as a whole, the RAC members viewed presentations on current projects by the research scientists, focusing primarily on proposed future directions.

Following the presentations, RAC members met in a roundtable discussion with the research scientists, focusing on ideas and responses the RAC members had concerning current and possible future projects.

In a second roundtable meeting, RAC members and research scientists met with OCLC executives, including K. Wayne Smith, president and CEO, and Mr. Muccino, as well as Dr. Noreault, and Thomas Hickey, OCLC chief scientist. These discussions were primarily aimed at projecting where the Office of Research should be going with its research. In particular, RAC stressed that the OCLC Office of Research is, in many ways, the premier independent research group within the library community today and a valuable resource, not only to OCLC but to the entire community. RAC members said this needs to be kept in focus as projects are considered.

Current projects presented at the meeting were:

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Bosnian Virtual Library Project: a cooperative effort with Harvard and Yale Universities in which OCLC is providing the bibliographic data from WorldCat (the OCLC Online Union Catalog), and the Office of Research is providing the expertise to automatically select Bosniaca, defined as all documents, in any format or language, on or about the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The project will yield a virtual catalog for the Bosnian National Library, which lost its building, collection and catalog to the recent warfare in that region. Libraries from around the world will be encouraged to supply the actual material, whenever possible, to the Bosnian National Library.

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Bradley C. Watson is consulting systems analyst, OCLC Office of Research.

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