For decades, OCLC has provided reliable infrastructure for OCLC numbers and authority records. Now, with financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we’re building a persistent, shared, and centralized entity management infrastructure for library linked data work.

When completed in December 2021, this infrastructure will include easily accessible authoritative descriptions of works and persons, enhanced and managed by OCLC and the library community. Connections to other external vocabularies will place library collections in a broader context across the web.

As always, we’re closely collaborating with the library community to fully understand and address needs. Our entity management infrastructure will be largely API-based, allowing librarians to customize their workflows around linked data opportunities. We will also create a basic user interface for librarians to create and manage entities.

No matter how far along your library is with using new data models (including BIBFRAME), or even if you wish to continue to work in MARC, you’ll see improved data quality and workflow efficiency as a result of this new entity management infrastructure.