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Sharpen your social skills in WorldCat.org

Now you can quickly rate items on a five-star scale, create and save drafts of reviews and write your review in your preferred language.

Your WorldCat profile page, which lets you share information about yourself such as your occupation, interests and links to personal Web pages, now lets you add a picture.

The WorldCat blog is designed to be a fun spot to read about what’s happening on WorldCat.org and to share cool ways that people are using the site in their libraries. Stop by and tell us what you think!

Users can share lists of items and subscribe to others’ lists from anywhere on the Web: public WorldCat lists are available as RSS feeds that can be monitored using any RSS-capable service or software. If your library uses WorldCat lists to promote specific resources—recently-added books or videos, staff recommendations, local authors—you can display the list content directly on your Web site with updates in real time via the list’s RSS feed using Javascript or a Javascript-to-RSS service.

Over 20 million article-level metadata records from British Library Inside, the library’s flagship serials service, are now in WorldCat.org. The new records increase by 60 percent the amount of article-level metadata in WorldCat.org and bring the number of article records to over 57 million.

The redesigned home page sports a new look and features tabbed ‘scope’ searching so you can easily limit retrievals to one of several popular formats: books, DVDs, CDs and articles.

Visit WorldCat.org

Hear ye, hear ye

The eAudiobook Blackstone Collection is now available to libraries from OCLC NetLibrary as an annual subscription with unlimited simultaneous user access. The collection consists of 1,800 titles and features best-selling fiction, history, mysteries, movie tie-ins, science fiction, children’s literature, classics and more, read by award-winning narrators. About 15 to 25 new titles are added each month at no additional cost to subscribers.

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Let’s chat

Reach out to users from every Web page with “Qwidget,” QuestionPoint’s chat widget. Qwidget combines the simplicity of a chat widget on the user side (similar in appearance to MeeboMe) with the power of QuestionPoint’s virtual reference management system on the librarian side. When users enter your service through Qwidget, your librarians have access to the full range of QuestionPoint features, including the ability for multiple librarians to cooperatively monitor the queue, referral options and post-session followup capabilities. The full range of reports and statistics also is available for Qwidget sessions.

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Get in synch

To help make library collections more visible on the Web, OCLC is using SRU (Search and Retrieve URLs) technology to keep WorldCat.org up-to-date and in synch with union catalogs around the world. SRU technology, a modernization of the Z39.50 protocol, makes it possible to update WorldCat, and thus WorldCat.org, in real time. The Nederlandse Centrale Catalogus (NCC: the Dutch Union Catalogue) is the first catalog to be synched with WorldCat using SRU technology. As bibliographic records and holdings are added to NCC, WorldCat is automatically updated in parallel. At the same time, the two union catalogs are synchronized by an exchange of record identifiers. On average, 1,800 records per day are sent from NCC to WorldCat. The second installation will be the Libraries Australia service later this year.

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WebJunction turns 5!

On May 12, 2008, WebJunction celebrated its fifth anniversary with the launch of a new brand, and Web articles looking back as well as forward to the next five years. WebJunction’s mission: to build and support online communities where library staff connect, create and learn. Since its release, the online community of library staff has grown to include:

  • More than a dozen community partner sites
  • 90,000+ unique monthly visitors
  • 30,000+ registered members, adding over 700 each month
  • 30,000+ e-learning courses taken
  • 30,000+ discussion board conversations

Later this year, WebJunction will roll out a new platform complete with new online courses, more partner sites and improved tools for social networking, content creation and sharing, training and learning management capabilities.

Visit WebJunction

National Library of China to add records to WorldCat

The National Library of China, the largest library in Asia, is adding its bibliographic records to WorldCat, making those records available to researchers worldwide. Using specially developed software to convert the format of its records, the library anticipates that some 1.5 million records will be sent to OCLC this year. These records, when added to WorldCat, will display Chinese characters. The library will continue adding records to WorldCat beyond 2008 once the format has been converted.

The new records enrich the value of WorldCat for scholarship worldwide and enhance WorldCat’s role as a bridge of understanding between cultures.

View news release

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