Key barriers to international resource sharing and OCLC actions to help remove them

The end goals of international resource sharing can be summed up in two phrases – “Find it” and “Get it”. This is what end‐users really care about. The information object, the real thing, is what they want and how and where are less important than when. It sounds so simple, but this is far from the reality. This paper reviews four of the key challenges surrounding global library resource sharing: the Internet and end‐user behaviour; languages and character sets; lack of a critical mass of online metadata for the world’s libraries; and lack of a tradition of library co‐operation in many countries. It also describes the initiatives that OCLC has underway to tackle the challenges head‐on.