SRU update and WorldCat
WorldCat's second SRU record update implementation went live between the Australian national union catalogue and WorldCat on 16th January 2009, meaning that records are now appearing in WorldCat within seconds of appearing in the union catalogue. After two weeks of running, 25,169 new records and 280,190 new holdings had been added to WorldCat and 74,880 holdings deleted. The implementation was the end result of months of coordinated development, configuration and planning involving people in Leiden, Dublin and Canberra.
A year ago, the Dutch union catalogue commenced updating WorldCat using SRU record update. In 12 months of operation, 443,843 new records and 3,013,571 new holdings have been added and 318,090 holdings deleted. Records are merged as part of the process of updating WorldCat.
The use of SRU record update not only ensures that catalogues are aligned and thus reliably increases the exposure of library data, it also eliminates the work involved in contributing records to WorldCat.