Putting the world into WorldCat
OCLC has been increasingly successful at establishing partnerships with national libraries around the world. A new set of Web pages devoted to national libraries has recently been introduced. The new Web site's timeline charts the progress of national library participation, indicating for example that the first national library outside North America, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands), began its partnership with OCLC in 1978. Today, over thirty national libraries are participating in the cooperative.
The national libraries' web site's most interesting feature is perhaps its interactive WorldMap, which began as a project of the OCLC Office of Research. The map shows the national libraries that participate in the OCLC cooperative by contributing data to WorldCat. You begin by clicking on a country and the map zooms in, revealing a link to that country's national library and data about its WorldCat holdings.
In addition to its work with national libraries, OCLC supports a number of national or regional union catalogues through its CBS (Central Bibliographic System) partners in the Netherlands, UK, Germany, France, and Australia. CBS provides a framework for strong and independent consortia of libraries to collaborate and share resources. Over the last year and a half, the CBS-based union catalogues of the GGC (Netherlands), HeBIS (Germany), Libraries Australia, and the GBV (Germany) have been loaded into WorldCat to give the library collections that these union catalogues describe broader exposure, from more places on the Web.
Beyond the national libraries and regional groups using CBS systems, OCLC has been reaching out to many other libraries and consortia around the world, resulting in the prospect of loading more than 250 million records from major non-U.S. institutions into WorldCat within the next couple of years. Taken together, all of this activity has gradually changed, and will continue to change the composition of WorldCat. For example, records describing library materials written in languages other than English now make up a little more than half of WorldCat's 120 million records.