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Products and Services : Cataloging and Metadata : Making WorldCat better

Making WorldCat better: quality control and enrichment

Every OCLC member has knowledge and competencies to share with and contribute to the cooperative in support of its mission to build and improve WorldCat. A number of services support member efforts to enrich and maintain this international resource and keep it connected to your catalog. Working together creates economies of scale for metadata enhancement, and every library benefits.

WorldCat Quality: An OCLC Report

This paper describes OCLC's steps to make it easier to find items in WorldCat and get them from OCLC member libraries.

  • In response to requests from the cataloging community, the Expert Community was enhanced in 2009 to give OCLC members with full-level cataloging authorizations more options to improve, upgrade, and make changes to WorldCat master records. An average of 1,000 libraries a month correct or enhance records in WorldCat.
  • Member libraries invest their time and expertise in enriching WorldCat through a number of collective efforts, including the Program for Cooperative Cataloging, which includes hundreds of libraries that participate in NACO, SACO, CONSER and BIBCO to contribute and improve authority and bibliographic records in WorldCat.
  • A number of OCLC-provided automated processes enrich WorldCat, including duplicate record detection and resolution, system-wide MARC updates and RDA (Resource Description and Access) compatibility.
  • OCLC administers support for VIAF, a cooperative effort involving an expanding number of national libraries and other agencies, to build an international service designed to provide convenient access to the world's major name authority files.

Through the OCLC cooperative, the library community has built and maintained a metadata creation and management service that has been remarkably stable and useful for 40 years. Because of the individual efforts of thousands of anonymous catalogers and librarians, WorldCat is born every day with new content to serve scholars, researchers and information seekers.

WorldCat change requests

All cataloging member libraries help improve record quality by requesting changes to WorldCat and authority records through the following request forms: