OCLC, CTIO: Committed Entirely to Assisting Libraries of All Shapes and Sizes Worldwide

Bart Murphy, Chief Technology and Information Officer, OCLC talks to Matt Athey, AHEAD's client director. Murphy shared that he will be completing 25 years of his professional life soon. He commenced his professional career in consulting, and the first half of his career journey was in the consulting field. It helped him get a lot of different perspectives to work with various industries and technologies and the reason behind eventually landing in Columbus in 2002, from DC. He has worked as an internal CTO with several different companies, and this is his fourth stint as a chief technology officer and chief information officer at OCLC. Murphy has worked in various sectors like insurance, managed healthcare care, and startups before coming to OCLC.

Murphy likes to unwind and unplug himself from the day-to-day grind and technology-led profile by spending time with his two teenage daughters and his family and indulging in sports. If the weather and time permit, he likes Golf and thinks it is a great way to unwind as one gets to meet people, have conversations, and be outside. He spends his time as a volunteer coach for a club team. He has been coaching throughout his career and now is almost doing it full-time for a club team. Murphy thinks coaching is the best way to give back to the sports or things you value.

OCLC is a unique product technology company with a purpose in Columbus, Ohio, with headquarters out of Dublin and offices spread across globally. OCLC serves the world's libraries of all shapes and sizes, whether a national archive, a university, a research library, federal agencies, corporate, public libraries worldwide. They provide a lot of the infrastructure, sort of innovative service services and research to connect those worlds and connect those libraries globally. So they can meet the needs of their user base and have tons of things related to efficiency.

OCLC's products are solely dedicated to supporting libraries. It is a nonprofit organization, unique from much private equity and even VC and larger companies. All efficiency gained within the company is reinvested into the business to innovate for the customers. They run huge data assets. WorldCat is a marquee, more well-known data asset from OCLC we. It has a collection of libraries worldwide and thousands and thousands of libraries close to over a hundred countries.

He explains that the amount of big data that OCLC manages is significant. In addition, they provide applications and services at a global scale via some network effect. OCLC also operates data centers in Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands in the United States.

OCLC was established in 1967. In these 58 years, the organization had to innovate multiple times through inflection points with technology, and currently, they are in a new inflection point. A look at the OCLC roadmap will highlight and showcase billions of records in their systems as a testament to the work OCLC has done in these years.

He shares that to work at this scale level, one has to start looking at the metadata required in the indexing to make that visible from a search perspective and something that someone could share. So a lot of metadata has to be pulled up to the surface. They are working heavily on a linked data strategy and a graph component as an organization. It is all natively built within the cloud because certain graph technologies aren't available. They are also looking at the cloud and building on graph technology to help them with linked data. There's a big roadmap with linked data, a lot of industry adoption has to occur related to linked data, but they are already building out and would make it live soon. Over a hundred million accessible entities of works in persons, and that's just a sort of new solution that they are going to provide out to the market to make material discoverable, but they have gone through many different iterations. A lot of work is done to make sure OCLC is visible on the web. A big part of their roadmap is building out more robust APIs.

They are working on many things from an API development perspective to integrate and allow their members to innovate as an extension of their applications. He explains that calling all this AI won't be apt as he gets very particular about AI. They have been doing advanced algorithms for quite some time, matching and maintaining billions of records. The level of complexity they have in their systems has been significant for quite some time, but they are seeing a massive benefit in machine learning models, many of which they have to custom put together because nobody's building it for this type of use case and it is helping them sift through even more billions the scale. So their coding, algorithms, and advanced things that other people may call AI to know all this need to be met with a machine learning model or group of models. They've seen many opportunities to improve speed throughput and reliability in this space.