Currently I am working on several projects.

• FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.) We are investigating how FRBR could be implemented and supported in WorldCat.
• ACE Exploration of a centralized solution for managing personal collections
• ALCME Developing a set of open-source tools for working with OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting and metdata for theses and dissertations.

  My last large project was the Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC). I developed and lead this project within the Office of Research starting in the summer of 1998. CORC was an unusual research project because it involved the majority of the Office of Research's staff in one role or other, and involved dozens of libraries as test sites even before leaving Research. CORC went live in January 1999 and transfered to OCLC Development in July of that year. Until July 2000, when CORC became an OCLC service, I continued to lead the requirements group.

  Here are some images from earlier projects:

  SecondSearch was a browsing prototype using the Library of Congress Subject Headings. It was implemented as a Java applet within a browser, including a full Z39.50 client. SecondSearch was the impetus to getting the FirstSearch 5.0 (aka Red Dog). project Some of the ideas found their way into FirstSearch 5.0. See 1997 and 1996 for more information.

  A research prototype using Java for scietific information display. This shows a port of Guidon, a specialized client for viewing journal articles. This version downloaded its own fonts in a unique (US patent #5,910,805) way that allowed easy zooming and grey scale display. It also had a rather unique way of showing multiple scrollable columns. More information.

  Here are some other projects I have lead since coming to OCLC in 1977:

  • Digital font design
  • Metadata for electronic theses
  • Full text search engine architecture
  • Web accessible name authority files
  • The original version of the FirstSearch interface
  • Layering text retrieval on top of relational databases
  • Detecting duplicate records in bibliographic databases
  • The use and design of search keys for bibliographic retrieval
  • Merging OCR streams in an optimal way (US patent #5,459,739)
  • Early research into digital access to electronic journals (US patent #4,803,643)
  Acess 2001 presentation about OAI
  NDLTD Conference presentation: A Public Catalog of Theses and Dissertations

  OCLC Research presentation: FRBR Algorithms

  JCDL Panel on the Importance of Metadata

  Access 2002 Deconstructing Cataloging

  Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries--Interoperability

  Page last updated June 4, 2001