Advocacy
Advocacy has been a part of OCLC’s mission since its founding in 1967. OCLC staff members meet and work regularly with library leaders, information professionals, researchers, entrepreneurs, political leaders, trustees, students and patrons to advocate “advancing research, scholarship, education, community development, information access, and global cooperation.”
OCLC’s most recent advocacy campaign, “Geek the Library,” highlights the vital role of public libraries in the current challenging environment. One goal of this community-based public awareness campaign is to increase local library support by encouraging the public to share what they ‘geek’, using the word as a verb. The idea is that every person has a passion that they ‘geek’ from modern art to chemical engineering, and that the library supports all of the passions in the community. The campaign, funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, uses a strategy based on the findings of the 2008 OCLC report, “From Awareness to Funding: A study of library support in America.”
Other past advocacy campaigns have focused on sharing the knowledge gained from library and information research. Such projects have included communities such as the Society of American Archivists, the Open Archives Initiative, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the International Organization for Standardization, the National Information Standards Organization, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and Internet2. One of the most successful contributions to this effort was the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, “an open forum of libraries, archives, museums, technology organization, and software companies who work together to develop interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models.”
OCLC host symposiums biannually at conferences of the American Library Association with the specific purpose of exploring and presenting how innovation in industry trends, technology developments, and social change events will impact libraries.
In the past, OCLC’s advertising spending used to focus on promoting its services to libraries. Now, however, the advertising has shifted to materials to advocate and market library services to communities they serve. These advertising and marketing programs increase libraries’ visibility and viability.
OCLC partnered with search engine providers in 2003 in order to advocate for libraries and share information across the broadest possible Internet landscape. Google, Yahoo!, and Ask.com have all collaborated with OCLC in order to make the WorldCat records searchable through those search engines.
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