OCLC's CORC (Cooperative Online Resource Catalog) project, an international cooperative effort to create a database of electronic resource descriptions modeled after WorldCat, has added the U.S. Government Printing Office to its list of participants. Since the U.S. government is a major publisher of databases and documents in electronic form, GPO's participation in the joint cataloging project is good news.
More than 240 institutions are now participating in CORC. OCLC is encouraging libraries interested in participating in the creation of the CORC database to apply via e-mail to corc@oclc.org. OCLC plans to release CORC as a new service later in 2000
OCLC also says it is discussing with the Research Libraries Group (RLG) how the two organizations can cooperate to create infrastructures for digital archiving. Library staffs are concerned with long-term retention of digital research resources because many online reference services take older infrequently accessed electronic resources off-line after a few years.
[Contact: OCLC, (614) 764-6000; Web: www.oclc.org].
