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Thanks a billion!
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Anne Slane, a cataloger at Worthington |
By Bob Murphy
WorldCat, the world’s richest online resource for finding library materials, now contains information about where to find 1 billion books, journals, theses and dissertations, musical scores, computer files, CDs, DVDs and other items in thousands of libraries worldwide.
At 2:21:34 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, August 11, Anne Slane, a cataloger at Worthington (Ohio) Libraries for 23 years, entered the 1 billionth holding in WorldCat for the book, The Monkees: The day-by-day story of the ’60s TV pop sensation.
“We’re just thrilled to have reached this milestone in WorldCat,” said Meribah Mansfield, Director of Worthington Libraries, in Worthington, Ohio, USA. “I started library school in 1971, the same year WorldCat went online, so I feel like we’ve grown up together. I remember library school was all abuzz about this great new advance in technology. Now, whenever I see a new development in library technology, I think in terms of ‘son of WorldCat’—or building on the idea of sharing resources that WorldCat began.”
“I started my library career at Worthington Libraries, and when I moved to the Technical Services Department in 1982, I was all agog at the formidable OCLC Beehive terminal and the powerful things it could do,” said Slane. “To this day, I remain in awe of the power and scope of OCLC and WorldCat.”
Thirty-four years after going online, WorldCat contains more than 62 million unique catalog records representing 1 billion items in libraries. The Bible, Mother Goose, Huckleberry Finn, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are among the top 10 titles in WorldCat, and together those 10 titles represent more than 1 million items in libraries worldwide. On the other end of the spectrum, there are many unique items cataloged in WorldCat, treasures held in only one place in the world, such as a Babylonian temple receipt for cattle and sheep used in temple services around 2350 B.C., or a papyrus manuscript of an edict issued by Publius Petronicus dating from 22 B.C.
The WorldCat of today is vastly different from that of 1971. Today’s WorldCat technological platform makes it possible to accommodate virtually all languages, formats and scripts. It is now possible to load records of entire collections from libraries all over the world. And what was once a resource used only by libraries and librarians is now available to searchers worldwide using their favorite Web search engines. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! make these detailed library records universally available.
“Thousands of catalogers and librarians around the world have worked together these past 34 years to create, keystroke by keystroke, record by record, and symbol by symbol, a unique and valuable library resource for knowledge seekers everywhere,” said Betsy Wilson, Chair, OCLC Board of Trustees, and Dean of University Libraries, University of Washington. “We have much to be proud of and much to celebrate.”
