OCLC announce agreements in Europe to extend coverage in WorldCat
OCLC has now announced four new agreements have been signed with European national libraries and affiliated institutions which significantly increase the coverage of records in WorldCat and the visibility of libraries in WorldCat.org within the Europe and Middle East regions. These latest agreements in Denmark, Switzerland, Slovenia and Israel show that libraries from around the globe are responding very positively to the opportunity that WorldCat offers to streamline workflows and increase visibility in WorldCat.org, a global destination web site for libraries, which surfaces to a worldwide community the collections they hold and the services they deliver.
In Denmark, OCLC and DanskBibliotekCenter (DBC) have agreed to load the Danish National Union Catalogue (DanBib) with holdings into WorldCat. DBC is responsible for providing the Danish national digital infrastructure as well as managing its national union catalogue. The agreement is the result of a year-long pilot coordinated with the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media (DALM), the governmental administrative and advisory body responsible for public and research libraries.
In Switzerland, OCLC and the Informationsverbund Deutschschweiz (IDS) have signed an agreement to load the records from the five IDS consortia to WorldCat. IDS which also includes the National Libraries of Luxembourg and Liechtenstein in their number, will be loading approximately 10 million bibliographic records and 16 million holdings records. IDS want to get a higher visibility for the libraries of Switzerland through WorldCat.org as well as gaining access to the 130 million records in WorldCat for cataloguing purposes.
In Slovenia, OCLC have finalised an agreement to load 3 million records later this year with IZUM, an organisation which represents the interests of over 380 academic, public and other libraries. The activities of IZUM are mainly engaged in the development and operation of the COBISS system and services (Co-operative Online Bibliographic System and Services), which represents the core of the library information system along with shared cataloguing and many other library automation applications in Slovenia. IZUM also provides users in Slovenia with free access to different foreign databases and services, including OCLC FirstSearch.
And finally in Israel, Malmad a consortium of over 30 academic institutions has just secured as part of their OCLC cataloguing subscription a complete retrospective batch load of holdings data into WorldCat, which will ensure that all holdings will be visible through OCLC Connexion, OCLC FirstSearch and WorldCat Resource Sharing.