Glenn E. Patton, OCLC Director, WorldCat Quality Management, thanked everyone who participated in the "Expert Community" experiment. Initital statistics from February 15 through August 15 were as follows:

Expert Community Experiment replaces:108,766

Number of institutions participating: 1,690 did at least one replace during the experiment with 368 institutions having activity each month.

The functionality that was implemented for the experiment will remain available.  Over the next few weeks, OCLC will complete their evaluation (including potential credits) and prepare for a wrap-up webinar that is planned for the latter half of September (date and time TBD).

The following update on the “Expert Community Experiment” has been provided by OCLC.

In March, there were 18,910 Expert Community Experiment replaces.  There were 1001 institutions that did at least one replace.  Individual institution numbers ranged from 3 institutions doing more than 500 replaces to 242 institutions doing 1 replace each.

Here are the numbers for the other types of replaces during the same time period:

Database Enrichment: 18,235
Minimal-Level Upgrade: 14,791
Enhance Regular: 15,052
Enhance National: 3,583
CONSER Authentication: 1,929
CONSER Maintenance: 6,183

OCLC staff replaced 1,086,715 records during the same time period.

The Experiment  began in mid-February 2009, and OCLC expects it to  last six months.

More information can be found by visiting the Expert Community Experiment page at http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog/quality/expert/default.htm

In response to requests from the cataloging community, OCLC is introducing the Expert Community Experiment which enables cataloging members to make more changes to WorldCat records.

During the Experiment, members with full level cataloging authorizations have the ability to improve and upgrade more WorldCat master records than has been previously possible.

OCLC expects the Experiment to begin in mid-February 2009, and to last six months.

More information can be found by visiting the Expert Community Experiment page at http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog/quality/expert/default.htm

Introductory web information sessions will be held throughout February. Dates and registration information can be found on the Expert Community Experiment page (see above). OCLC encourages interested members attend one of the webinars, however it is not a requirement for participation in the Experiment. (You can also view the recorded version of the webinar when available.)

Credits

OCLC announces the following regarding credits for the Expert Community Experiment: participants will receive credits for those activities for which they currently receive credits. During the Experiment, OCLC will not give credits for the new activity. Instead, OCLC plans to review new activity for possible credit adjustment later in the Experiment.

The “Experiment” is in response to complaints such as “I discovered a problem in the new record I created last week … but other institutions have used the record so I can’t fix the problem”

The experiment will allow these and many other fixes to WorldCat Master records.