With Web Harvester, the new functionality allows you to select and deselect files to be included in or excluded from your harvest—giving you even more control over the Web content that you harvest and ingest. Additionally, both Web Harvester and Connexion digital import ingest workflows have changed so that the items require Approval in CONTENTdm Administration. This enables you to make metadata edits, via the Approve queue, prior to indexing. It also aligns these workflows with standard CONTENTdm workflows. What’s more, the enhancements fix a known issue of ingests to CONTENTdm from Web Harvester and Connexion digital import “freezing.”

The Web Harvester is an option for users of the CONTENTdm Hosting Services who want to add Web-based content, such as government documents, subject specific Web sites, or organizational Web sites, to their digital collections. While Connexion digital import enables catalogers using the Connexion client to add digital items to CONTENTdm collections during the cataloging process. By integrating digital collection creation with standard cataloging workflows, it offers another option to libraries seeking to expand participation in growing and maintaining their digital collections.

Learn more about Web Harvester

OAIster, PapersFirst and ProceedingsFirst added to WorldCat.org

Records from these three databases are now indexed in WorldCat.org and included in WorldCat.org search results:

OAIster

Photo used courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum Jazz Collection.

OAIster records are now fully accessible through WorldCat.org, and are included in standard WorldCat.org search results. OAIster is a union catalog of more than 23 million records that represent the open archives resources built by harvesting open archives digital collections worldwide.

Originally started at the University of Michigan in 2002, the database includes materials such as digitized books and articles, audio and video files, photos, data sets, theses and research papers.

There are also plans to release a freely accessible, discrete view of the OAIster records in January 2010 through a URL specific to OAIster.

To see how OAIster records look in WorldCat.org, see a sample search (limited to internet resources) on

• ti:temples bouddhiques
• kw:louis armstrong leon rene

PapersFirst and ProceedingsFirst

PapersFirst and ProceedingsFirst have now also been added to WorldCat.org results. These two indexes contain papers from conferences, symposiums and expositions worldwide. Created from items received by The British Library Document Supply Centre—you’ll find 7.4 million published items in English, French, Spanish and Chinese.

Use these sample searches to see how PapersFirst and ProceedingsFirst items look in WorldCat.org:

• Fighting fire with fire brain stimulation for the treatment of epilepsy (PapersFirst)
• Strategies towards sustainability of protected cultivation in mild winter climate (ProceedingsFirst)

WorldCat Registry adds contact visibility option

Now you can make specific contact information visible for anyone searching the WorldCat Registry, as long as you’re an authorized Registry user. Potential shared details include name, role, phone, e-mail, and fax. The change can help broaden visibility for key staff at your institution. Simply select a contact (or contacts) by checking the box “allow this contact to be visible to all” in the “Contacts” section of your library’s Registry profile.

On Facebook? Become a Fan of WorldCat on the new WorldCat Page. Then upload a photo, start a discussion, or post a question to the wall.

With the new release, the CONTENTdm Project Client now supports auto updates, enabling users to get updates as quickly as they are available. It automatically checks for software updates in the background, so work is not interrupted. If updates are available, they are downloaded but not installed until the organization is ready.

To better support text-based collections, PDF print quality can now be specified in the Project Client, enabling users to select a quality level when generating optional print versions of their compound objects. For users with large, full-text collections, several enhancements improve performance and reduce indexing times. Other enhancements include the addition of a new thesaurus, Canadian Subject Headings (CSH), and configuration options to filter hits in Usage Reports. 

This new release is available to current CONTENTdm licensees at no additional charge.

This month, four collections from the CONTENTdm Collection of Collections are featured on the OCLC Web site. The featured collections for November are FORGOTTEN: The Arkansas Korean War Project; The Indian Sentinel, 1902-1962; Welcome Home, Howard! and the Digital Collections at the Chicago Public Library.

FORGOTTEN: The Arkansas Korean War Project Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Central Arkansas Library System This digital collection from the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies presents interview recordings and archival materials from veterans of the Korean War. Often overshadowed by other conflicts, much of the history of The Korean War exists only in the memories and mementos of its veterans. This project aims to document this important history and ensure these materials are preserved to help educators, researchers and future generations understand more about the Korean War.

The Indian Sentinel, 1902-1962 Marquette University This digital collection highlights "The Indian Sentinel," which featured articles about Native Americans across the United States and their evangelization by the Catholic Church. Most were first-hand accounts by lifelong missionaries in the field that were often illustrated with photographs they had taken. Also featured are articles, essays and letters by Native Americans, many of whom were students in Catholic schools.

Welcome Home, Howard! University of Nevada, Las Vegas This collection from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas features photographic images and portraits documenting the life of Howard Hughes, including images selected from two collections: The Howard Hughes Collection and the Hughes Electronics Collection.

Digital Collections at Chicago Public Library Chicago Public Library In this collection, you will find digital images from the Chicago Public Library’s special collections. Highlights include construction views of Millennium Park, a visual record of Civil War battlefields, photographs of Harold Washington, documents from the Chicago Renaissance and pictures of Chicago neighborhoods.

More than 30,000 photographs, articles and oral histories from eyewitnesses, held in the Cowles Library Special Collections, were digitized to create the Drake Heritage Collections. Built using CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management Software, they consist of 12 digital collections and include a range of materials from the Drake University's Yearbooks and Pulitzer Prize winner Jay Norwood 'Ding' Darling’s editorial cartoons to the music of Drake University’s bands.

As part of his presentation, Bart explained how he integrates Google Maps with CONTENTdm and the Historic Des Moines digital collection featuring 200 photographs of homes, parks and public places taken between 1904 and 1914. As a result, library users get a new perspective on the special collections and its unique value to the community. Bart also offered a quick online tutorial of how to create a Google Map and integrate it into an online digital collection.

Additionally, Bart talked about some of the creative ways he markets the Digital Heritage Collections to the Drake University campus, the Des Moines community, Iowa residents and worldwide.

The Webinar recording

The Webinar recording is now available for online viewing and includes a 10-minute introduction to CONTENTdm by Ron Gardner, OCLC Digital Library Consultant.

Drake Heritage Collections presentation [WebEx recording - 56 minutes]
Bart Schmidt, Digital Projects Librarian
Drake University

View the Drake Heritage Collections

Library info pages now show library card sign up link and recent lists breakouts

Two new features were added to WorldCat.org this month that enhance the usefulness of your library info page on the site: the "Apply for a library card" link and new breakout categories on lists of recently-added items.

The "Apply for a library card" link (circled) is drawn from your library's WorldCat Registry profile in the "Name and Location" section, and the Recent items list breakouts (highlighted) are automatically generated for you each month, from your previous month's WorldCat holdings.

• Apply for a library card link
  Once you add a link to your online library card sign-up form through the WorldCat Registry, now WorldCat.org will display it for your users. So anyone who finds your library through WorldCat can immediately become an online borrower.

• Fiction/Juvenile breakouts on recent items lists
  Your library's monthly auto-generated list of items recently added to WorldCat just got even better—now there are 4 separate sublists for fiction, nonfiction, juvenile and nonjuvenile materials. You can point to this page from blog posts, newsletters—anywhere you want to highlight new content for specific readers. (Note that the "All items" list has an RSS feed on it. Soon the breakout categories will have individual RSS feeds, too.)

See both of these enhancements in action from the Huntington Beach Public Library's "info" page on WorldCat.org

More WorldCat news

Elsevier ScienceDirect articles now on WorldCat.org

Elsevier metadata for SCOPUS and ScienceDirect collections from 2006 to the present have now been indexed in WorldCat.org search results. This article-level metadata joins similar content such as the GPO Monthly Catalog, ArticleFirst, Medline, ERIC and the British Library Inside Serials. The ScienceDirect content corresponds to 1,800 journals, 150 book series and more than 1.3 million records.

Goodreads reviews are in

WorldCat has now added Goodreads reviews to help users evaluate materials with fellow readers' comments. You'll find Goodreads reviews in the "Reviews" section alongside WorldCat, WeRead, and Amazon reviews.

On Facebook? Become a Fan of WorldCat on the new WorldCat Page. Then upload a photo, start a discussion, or post a question to the wall.

The Credo Reference collection includes over three million entries from hundreds of well-regarded titles from over 70 of the world's best reference publishers.  Credo's collection is intelligently integrated with millions of cross-references and contains a wide range of subject-specific titles covering everything from art to accountancy, science to Shakespeare and law to literature plus dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias, quotations and atlases. 

When a record for a title from Credo Reference (OCLC symbol CREDO) is added or matched to WorldCat, a 938 field is added to the MARC record that contains the vendor code CRED.  This code is indexed; vendor records are searchable in Connexion using the vendor index (Vendor (vn:) in the dropdown menu).  Some examples of the records added to WorldCat from Credo Reference are OCLC numbers: #436848185, #437303088.  Some examples of records matched in WorldCat are OCLC numbers:  #428818194, #246969140.

For information about Credo Reference, see their web site at: http://www.credoreference.com.

See a list of all partners contributing records through the Vendor Record Contribution Program.

WorldCat Registry now includes library card field

Photo attribution: ilovelibraries.org
Library Card Sign-up

September is national library card sign-up month for libraries in the United States, so there’s no better time to take advantage of the latest new field added to the WorldCat Registry—the Library Card Form page. This new field lets you add the URL for your library card sign-up form to your Registry profile. Find it in the “Name and Location” section of your profile. Once you add it, soon new users who find your library through WorldCat.org will be able to apply for a library card immediately.

Add your library card sign-up form URL to your WorldCat Registry profile now >>

More WorldCat news

Facebook apps for back-to school

The WorldCat CiteMe app was recently recognized in the article, “Back to School: 15 Essential Web Tools for Students” by Mashable, the world's largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news. There are two Facebook apps for WorldCat:

• WorldCat – an app that lets you find items in WorldCat from right within Facebook
• CiteMe – an app that delivers formatted citations from WorldCat in one of 5 standard styles: APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA or Turabian.

  Add the apps to your library’s Facebook page today, and then check out the article for other good apps and tips to get back in the school swing of things.

The xISBN Web service supplies ISBNs and other information associated with an individual intellectual work represented in WorldCat. Submit an ISBN to this service, and it returns a list of related ISBNs and selected metadata.

The xISBN service is based on WorldCat, the world's largest network of library content and services.

With this new enhancement, you can now easily have all of your results link directly to the WorldCat.org item—which means if a user finds an item through your xISBN-powered app, they can now quickly locate it in a nearby library through WorldCat.org.

To enable automatic linking to WorldCat.org, simply add the argument "?fl=url" to the end of an xISBN request, like this:
http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/0596002815?fl=url
Get more details and gain access to xISBN through the WorldCat Affiliates page on the WorldCat.org Web site.

All WorldCat Local libraries in North America (Canada, US, Mexico) Central America, Caribbean, and South America that do not currently purchase content from Syndetic Solutions are eligible to participate in the trial that will continue through June 30, 2010.

Library staff members control access to the trial content in the >My WorldCat.org >User Interface Options section of the Service Configuration module. The new evaluative content is available now in WorldCat Local, but it will not display to users until the option to “Display Syndetics data?” is set to “Show” in Service Configuration.

Evaluative content included in the trial

The trial will surface six new evaluative content elements within the WorldCat Local interface. These elements include:

• Cover Art
• Reviews from Library Journal
• Reviews from Publisher’s Weekly
• First Chapters
• Descriptions / Summaries
• Table of Contents

For the purpose of this trial program, Syndetic Solutions has chosen to feature the six key content elements listed above. At the conclusion of the trial libraries may choose subscribe to these existing elements or add additional elements that include: fiction profiles, find similar titles, series list, first chapters, author notes, awards, Spanish and German content, video & music profiles and reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, Choice, Horn and Kirkus.

Next steps

The trial of Syndetic Solutions evaluative content in WorldCat Local will continue through June 30, 2010. Following the trial, WorldCat Local libraries may choose to add a subscription to this content to their WorldCat Local subscription for an additional charge.

Contact your OCLC Library Services Consultant for an estimate of the price of this add-on purchase for your library.

This month, four collections from the CONTENTdm Collection of Collections are featured on the OCLC Web site. The featured collections for October are Milwaukee Waterways; U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service National Digital Library; Cuban Photograph Collections and Early Advertising of the West, 1867-1918.

Milwaukee Waterways Milwaukee Public Library Milwaukee Waterways illustrates the role Lake Michigan and Milwaukee's rivers have played in the history of Milwaukee. Pictures of the harbor and ships from around the world loading and unloading materials show the variety of materials that have passed through the Port over time. Other pictures illustrate the role the rivers played in the commercial development of the city. Aerial views of the harbor and rivers and lakefront show the changing uses of the water and land. The photographs are from three collections contributed by the Port of Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Public Library, and the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society.

FWS National Digital Library U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's National Digital Library is a searchable collection of selected still images, publications, historical artifacts, audio, and video clips that are in the public domain. Topics covered include fisheries, plants, wildlife management, endangered species, wildlife refuges, habitat restoration, migratory birds, environmental sciences, recreation, training and outreach, hunting, water conservation, and more.

Cuban Photograph Collections University of Miami The Cuban Photograph Collections include over 5,000 photographs which span a wide range of historical topics related to Cuba and the Cuban Diaspora. Highlights include historical images from the War of Independence against Spain (1895-1898), and photochroms important to the history of photography taken in Cuba at the end of the Spanish-American War by renowned American photographer William Jackson.

Early Advertising of the West, 1867-1918 University of Washington Libraries This collection contains over 450 print advertisements published in local magazines, city directories, and theater pamphlets from 1867 to 1918. These advertisements were selected and digitized in order to help researchers and students examine social, cultural and economic trends during this period. The collection is categorized into thematic groups and features advertisements about health care and hygiene products, liquor, tobacco, machinery, manufacturing, transportation, fashion, food and household goods and local tourism.

Library authorities in Bournemouth, Bath & NE Somerset, Bristol, North Somerset, Somerset, South Gloucestershire and Plymouth are working with OCLC to implement a discovery interface that will enable users to search and place reservations on materials held across the South West region. The service is a replacement for Wisdom, formerly supplied by DS Ltd, now part of the Axiell Group. By adopting this approach, the libraries will also raise their profile on the Web by becoming visible in WorldCat.org, the Web destination for discovery of library resources.

Rob Froud OBE, Head of Cultural Service at Somerset County Council and Chairman of the SWRLS Management Board said of the announcement: “We opted to work with OCLC because we sought a service our library customers would view instantly as highly attractive and easy-to-use. Our library staff are also served by having a solution that is technically robust and simple to implement.” Asked whether he felt other libraries in the region might join at a later stage, Mr Froud said: “Other libraries have expressed an intention to join and it is our hope they will do so soon, but we are very happy with the initial roll-out as it is another demonstration that the model of collaborative working across public library authorities is thriving.”

The libraries, through their participation in UnityUK, are already regularly updating their bibliographic and holdings information, which OCLC then uploads to WorldCat. This facilitated records transfer has opened up the potential for them to utilise services built on the WorldCat platform, including WorldCat Local. The seven SWRLS libraries will have their own individualised Web discovery interface reflecting their libraries’ branding and holdings switched on. Each interface will also present real-time holdings information from the other participating libraries to quicken the time it takes for users to locate items of interest. Requests will then be managed by the libraries’ underlying management systems, in this case Axiell’s Galaxy and Talis Alto. Inter-library loan requests by SWRLS libraries are managed by UnityUK.

The decision by libraries in the South West to adopt WorldCat Local as a shared service comes at a time when public libraries across the country are joining up service provision. In September, the Society of Chief Librarians announced an initiative to allow members of a library to borrow books from any of 4000 libraries in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. And, as has been widely reported, the government is planning a national request service backed up by home delivery in an attempt to reinvigorate the public’s perception of libraries.

Visit the OCLC Web site for more information on WorldCat Local.

About SWRLS
South Western Regional Library Service was founded in 1937 as a charitable organisation, and exists to act as an advocate for, and to promote cooperation between, the libraries across all sectors in the South West. There are currently 56 members of SWRLS, consisting of public library authorities, academic and special libraries and around 25,000 interlibrary loan transactions are carried out annually between them. For further information see the website at www.swrls.org.uk.

About OCLC
Founded in 1967 and headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, OCLC is a nonprofit library service and research organization that has provided computer-based cataloging, reference, resource sharing, eContent, preservation, library management and Web services to 71,000 libraries in 112 countries and territories. OCLC and its member libraries worldwide have created and maintain WorldCat, the world’s richest online resource for finding library materials. Search WorldCat.org on the Web at www.worldcat.org. For more information, visit www.oclc.org.