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".[39][40]
WebJunction, which provides training services to librarians,[41] is a division of OCLC funded by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation beginning in 2003.[42][43]
OCLC partnered with search engine providers in 2003 to advocate for libraries and share information across the Internet landscape. Google, Yahoo!, and Ask.com all collaborated with OCLC to make WorldCat records searchable through those search engines.[39]
OCLC's advocacy campaign "Geek the Library", started in 2009, highlights the role of public libraries. 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".[44]
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 organizations, and software companies who work together to develop interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models."[39]
OCLC has collaborated with the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia volunteer community, through integrating library metadata with Wikimedia projects, hosting a Wikipedian in residence, and doing a national training program through WebJunction called "Wikipedia + Libraries: Better Together".[45][46]
