View this and past issues on the Web at http://www5.oclc.org/downloads/design/abstracts/

Preparing an NEH Preservation Assistance Grant? OCLC can help!

A well-written proposal that clearly reveals your vision, mission, strategy and program enhances your chances of winning grant funding—and you can rely on OCLC’s grant development services to help you showcase your program needs.

The May 14 deadline for submitting an NEH Preservation Assistance Grants proposal is quickly approaching, and OCLC consultants are ready to help. They can advise you on proposal content and style and deliver entire proposals or assist with specific sections. The $2,000, $3,500 or $5,000 grants will be awarded in December.

Preservation Assistance Grants help libraries, museums, historical societies and other organizations preserve and care for humanities collections. The collections may include special collections of books and journals, archives and manuscripts, prints and photographs, moving images, sound recordings, architectural and cartographic records, decorative and fine arts, textiles, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, furniture and historical objects.

If you are interested in working with OCLC to develop a proposal, please contact Tom Clareson, Education and Planning Manager, Digital Collection and Preservation Services, OCLC at 800/848-5878, ext. 6071 or by e-mail at Tom_Clareson@oclc.org

Grants and Funding
NEH Preservation Assistance Grants

Take a look at an international ranking of the top 500 universities

Shanghai Jiao Tong University Institute of Higher Education provides an “Academic Ranking of World Universities” based on several indicators of academic or research performance, including Nobel laureates, highly cited researchers, articles published in Nature and Science, articles in Science Citation Index-expanded and Social Science Citation Index and academic performance per faculty. The top ten are: Harvard University, Stanford University, California Institute of Technology, University of California at Berkeley, University of Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Yale University, University of Oxford and Columbia University.

View rankings

OCLC to convert Newberry Library holdings for worldwide sharing

The Newberry Library, an independent research library in Chicago, Illinois, devoted to the humanities, has contracted with OCLC for the retrospective conversion of approximately 725,000 of the library’s records. Over the next three years, OCLC will create MARC records for each title and enter the Newberry Library’s holdings in WorldCat, the world’s largest bibliographic database.

“This conversion project not only provides unprecedented access to the Library's catalog, it paves the way for future planning including digitization and collection development,” said Charles Cullen, President and Librarian, Newberry Library. “The conversion of our card-form catalog records is fundamental to our strategic plan, and we are extremely pleased that we will be able to address that goal in a timely and efficient manner.”

Full story

OCLC welcomes the following new member libraries

Bret Harte School
Location: Corcoran, California, USA
OCLC Symbol: BKTJL

Burbank Middle School
Location: Boulder, Colorado, USA
OCLC Symbol: BURJL

Connell High School
Location: Connell, Washington, USA
OCLC Symbol: CONJL

Memorial Middle School
Location: Joplin, Missouri, USA
OCLC Symbol: MMSJL

Mike O'Callaghan Middle School
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
OCLC Symbol: MOMJL

Midway Elementary School
Location: Church Road, Virginia, USA
OCLC Symbol: MDWJL

Membership guidelines and protocols

WorldCat update

Every 12 seconds an OCLC member library adds a new record to WorldCat, which contains more than 54 million records representing 919,578,849 holding locations as of April 10, 2004. Every 4 seconds an OCLC member library fills an interlibrary loan request using WorldCat, which has supported 135,034,859 interlibrary loan requests as of April 10, 2004. A library user searches WorldCat using the OCLC FirstSearch service every second.

See the latest WorldCat record

Subscribe/Unsubscribe | Questions/Comments

OCLC Abstracts uses the Internet to deliver timely information about OCLC services, programs, news and events directly to subscribers’ desktops. This e-journal augments and complements OCLC’s Web site and print communications.