Glossary -- A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

NDLP Glossary - O

object

A concept from computer science that is the basis for an approach to software design and implementation that has become increasingly popular in recent years. The definition of an object warrants a whole chapter in some textbooks [e.g. Object Engineering, Gary C. Sullo. John Wiley & Sons, 1994. QA76.64.S83].

In the context of the NDLP documentation, the term is used primarily to refer to an item stored in a digital archive. The simplest form of digital object in the archive can be thought of as a computer file that holds a digital representation of an item such as a photograph or sound recording, packaged with the "basic information needed to do anything useful" with that file.

IMPORTANT: It has not yet been decided exactly what this "basic information" to be held within the digital object comprises. For more information see metadata.

OCLC

Online Computer Library Center. The OCLC web-site announces that "OCLC is a nonprofit computer service and research organization whose participants include more than 21,000 libraries in the U.S. and 63 other countries and territories. OCLC®services help libraries locate, acquire, catalog, and lend library materials." OCLC has played an important role in library automation during the last twenty years, particularly through its support services for catalogers all over the world and for its facilitation of interlibrary loan. OCLC maintains a "union catalog" (WorldCat), which has records for over 31 million unique items, of which 26 million are for books, including information about which libraries own copies of the items. More recent projects include Electronic Journals Online and InterCat, a project to develop a catalog of the best resources on the Internet.

LC is a major contributor of catalog records to WorldCat.

OCR

Optical Character Recognition. An automated process by which the image of a page of print or typescript is converted into text that can be manipulated in a word processor or indexed for searching by every word in the text. OCR is not perfect, with results depending heavily on the size and clarity of the original typeface and the condition of the original document. The requirement on contractors for NDLP when converting documents to manipulable text (usually marked up in SGML) is 99.95 percent. Achieving this level of accuracy is likely to involve either OCR followed by human proof-reading and editing or complete re-keying.

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(1/19/96)