|  |
|
Libraries and social networking Advocacy: Social networking encourages teen library usage Tips and Tricks: A del.icio.us directory Labs: It's cloudy in research but with little chance of rain Research: Exploring the potential of registries 
|
Making WorldCat more inclusiveIn the past year, we have been working hard to make WorldCat more inclusive at the local, group and global levels. In August 2006 we introduced the WorldCat.org Web site. It offers a search box that people can download and use to search the more than 88 million records and 1.1 billion holdings in WorldCat. For the first time, collections in OCLC member libraries became visible on the Internet to people everywhere. Since then, we have enhanced WorldCat.org with more content (35 million article-level records from ArticleFirst, ERIC, GPO and MEDLINE) and a citation capability. Our goal in releasing this new way to access WorldCat was to drive search traffic to the library, and it has done just that. In May 2007, the number of people coming into WorldCat from the Web had increased 193 percent over May of 2006, going from 4.8 million to 13.9 million. During that same period, the number of people clicking through to library services on a library Web site increased 490 percent, from 144,000 to 851,000. These are people who started out on the Web and ended up at or in a library. In May, we started the WorldCat Local pilot at the University of Washington. WorldCat Local provides libraries with a way to customize WorldCat.org as a solution for local discovery and delivery services. WorldCat Local interoperates with locally maintained services such as circulation, resource sharing and resolution to full text to create a seamless experience for library users. WorldCat Local was recently launched as a pilot at the Peninsula Library System in California and will soon be piloted at nine libraries in Illinois, and at The Ohio State University. We plan to go into production with WorldCat Local later this year. This past June, a new social networking tool was added to WorldCat.org—WorldCat Lists. Users can create lists of their favorite items located in the WorldCat database. Lists can then be shared with family, friends or the entire WorldCat community. More than 10,000 lists were created in the first eight weeks. The creativity found in these lists is fascinating: categories ranging from “Organic Chemistry” and “Naval History” to “Good Read-Alouds for Older Adults” and “Afrocentric Voices in Classical Music.” It can be argued that WorldCat has been one of the most successful examples of social networking by professionals, who have been contributing and sharing information at the institution level since 1971. Now, the social network built by the library community is going to end-users. WorldCat Lists is OCLC’s first venture into user-created, i.e., nonlibrarian, content. This issue of NextSpace explores some of the opportunities that are emerging for libraries in social networking. Providing information to people when and where they need it has been a long-standing goal of libraries and the OCLC cooperative. Going forward, we’re excited about the possibilities presented by social networking technology for more dynamic connections to the rich collections of libraries around the world.
Jay Jordan |
