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Benefits of membership
When your library, archive or museum joins OCLC, you become part of a unique global community focused on collaboratively building and enhancing library services, advocating and promoting libraries and library usage, and advancing and shaping the future of librarianship and information science. You and other librarians are united by your shared commitment to research, scholarship and education and to the enduring values of cooperation, resource sharing and public service. And you are dedicated to a common goal: improving access to the world's information, a global mission that touches librarians and other cultural heritage staff individually.
Over the past 40 years, membership cooperation has enabled OCLC to develop close ties with the library community and to build services targeted solely at strengthening library services. The ability to listen and respond to member needs was one of the key elements in the cooperative's early success in cataloging. And it continues to be critical today, as OCLC and member libraries renew and reinvent their value in a Web world.
Among the benefits of membership:
- Collaborative savings through shared services
OCLC membership allows libraries to accomplish more working together than they could separately. By sharing resources, libraries save money and build cooperative solutions that improve productivity and streamline operations, such as cataloging, collection development, preservation, archiving and reference activities. Libraries reduce duplicate effort through the use of shared data and services that enrich the flow of knowledge and information by helping users identify and connect diverse content in a networked world.
- WorldCat: the value of cooperation
WorldCat illustrates the best of what is possible through cooperation and is a tribute to the collaborative spirit of libraries. Keystroke by keystroke, record by record, librarians have built WorldCat into the world's foremost bibliographic database. Representing more than 70,000 collections large and small, WorldCat contains 135 million records and 1.3 billion holding locations. It spans over 5,000 years of recorded knowledge in 475 languages. Like the knowledge it describes, WorldCat grows steadily. Every second, member libraries add seven records to WorldCat.
In addition, WorldCat is the foundation of many OCLC services, including WorldCat Local, WorldCat Resource Sharing, the WorldCat Link Resolver and the FirstSearch reference service, adding even more value to this cooperatively developed resource. Having grown from a union catalog, WorldCat is now available on the Web at WorldCat.org, where information seekers can more easily find library resources during their search for materials. As an additional value to OCLC members and qualifying institutions, API access to WorldCat is now also available.
WorldCat has not only helped librarians reduce duplication of effort, it has become a unique global resource highly valued by scholars, researchers and Web searchers.
- Promoting library expertise on the Web
The launch of WorldCat.org in 2006 represented an important advance in both the availability of member resources and the promotion of authoritative information in the Web world. Through WorldCat.org, the cooperative is experimenting with various models for integrating the collections and services of member libraries into the consumer Web space to reach Web users who are now more likely to turn first to their Web browser—not their library—for information. The cooperative partners with Google, Yahoo! and other Internet companies to put library records and holdings in the results lists of search engines, online bibliographies and online booksellers in order to drive traffic to libraries. Each month, there are about 13 million page views of WorldCat.org that originate from search engine sites and other partners. Traffic from WorldCat.org to library services—OPACs, ILL services, full-text articles, virtual reference services—average some 700,000 per month, with approximately 80 percent of click-throughs going to library OPACs. New partnerships are in development with cellular phone providers and others to grow the reach and impact of library services and increase the impact of mobile devices.
In 2003, the cooperative began building partnerships with search engine providers to share the world’s information and promote libraries across the broadest possible Internet landscape. Today, the cooperative shares WorldCat records with Google to better facilitate discovery of member collections through the Google Book Search program, which makes the full text of over 7 million digitized books searchable. Working with Yahoo!, the cooperative developed a special edition on the Yahoo! Toolbar, which provides always-there access to WorldCat records via Yahoo! Search, plus the full complement of Yahoo! services. Searchers simply click on the WorldCat button to locate library materials nearest them. Ask.com also crawls WorldCat records for inclusion in their indexes. These Web partnerships are an important, and likely only a first step, in creating increased value by for members by advancing the mission of libraries.
- Shaping the future with library centered research
OCLC research provides the cooperative with an infrastructure and interactive process for helping libraries, archives and museums deal with the rapidly changing digital, global community. Researchers study information technology and identity technical advances that are of value to the library community. They also participate in national and international standards bodies, representing the interests of the library community. Over the past decade, the cooperative has invested more than $130 million to develop new solutions for the changing needs of libraries. The cooperative works with libraries to define opportunities, develop consensus and provide research, programs and prototypes that allow libraries, archives and museums to solve the challenges of information access and management.
- Leadership and development
The cooperative promotes the evolution of libraries by providing information professionals with opportunities for advanced education and leadership opportunities. Members regularly receive special reports that discuss trends affecting libraries and other institutions. Member libraries also have an active voice and formal role in the governance of OCLC. Opportunities to learn from industry leaders, dialogue with OCLC leadership and steer the organization itself include Global and Regional Councils and the Board of Trustees. OCLC also provides specific career development opportunities such as grants, the IFLA Fellows Program and the Spectrum Initiative.
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