Extending WorldCat, raising the visibility of libraries

Christine Deschamps, former IFLA president, former OCLC trustee and well-known French librarian, attended the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, Switzerland this past December at OCLC's behest. There were 44 heads of state, prime ministers, presidents and vice-presidents, and 83 ministers and vice-ministers from 176 countries in attendance. Librarians were there too, as part of a six-member IFLA delegation.

While the Summit participants initially focused on technology, librarians made their presence known, and with it, introduced a new focus on libraries and the content they provide in the Information Society. Armed with pamphlets, brochures and minutes of daily meetings, the librarians pressed their case throughout the Summit.

“One of the delegates was heard to say that he was sick of hearing about libraries all the time,” said Mme. Deschamps, a testament to the ubiquity of the library delegation. “It is up to us (librarians) to demonstrate that the global library network provides the foundation for the global information society.”

Mme. Deschamps is right—it is up to us to make libraries more visible, not only at World Summits, but in the daily lives of people around the world. I am pleased to report that your OCLC cooperative has been doing much recently along those lines.

Open WorldCat pilot

In June 2003, we started the Open WorldCat pilot to determine the feasibility of providing a new service that would integrate the collections of OCLC member libraries into heavily used Web sites. The notion was to make it easy for a person who is looking for information via a search engine to end up finding it in a nearby library. To do this, we would make WorldCat records directly available to the general public for the first time. Heretofore, as you know, WorldCat had been available only through participating libraries.

We began the pilot after extensive consultations with the Board of Trustees, Members Council, regional service providers and member libraries. There was consensus that this was something we had to try. After all, numerous recent studies had indicated that people are increasingly turning to the Web first for their information needs, often ignoring libraries when doing research. The pilot offered the possibility of raising the visibility of libraries on the Web.

Eight months later, the pilot service is now available from a variety of services on the Web including Abebooks, Alibris, Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), BookPage and HCI Bibliography. For example, a person searching the ABAA Web site for an out-of-print book would have the option of finding libraries holding the item if the search came up with no hits among ABAA members. “Find it in a WorldCat Library by pressing the button below,” the message reads. Users are doing about 50,000 searches a month on these sites.

Last September, we notified member libraries that in partnership with Google, we were making a subset of 2 million abbreviated records from WorldCat available on the Google search service, with links to the Web-based catalogs and sites of 12,000 academic, public and school libraries participating in OCLC.

The pilot with Google has attracted a great deal of attention in the library community. There is strong support among the OCLC membership. Of the original 12,000 libraries included in the pilot, only 193 (1.6 percent) have withdrawn, and an additional 48 institutions, including 12 state libraries, have asked to join. In December, the records started showing up on Google. To date, about 360,000 abbreviated records are available. (Since the pilot began, Google has changed its harvesting limits to accommodate WorldCat records.) Users are now doing about 10,000 click-throughs a week on WorldCat records on Google and its affiliates, AOL and Netscape. While this is a relatively small number, the trends are encouraging.

In November and December, we held market research sessions with U.S. academic, public and school librarians. We also conducted usability tests with librarians and end-users. In January, we held market research sessions with a group of academic librarians in the United Kingdom. We will be conducting market research sessions with end-users in the United States. We will continue to listen closely to libraries and their users during the pilot and will refine the service based on their feedback. In the coming months, we will decide whether to proceed with implementation of an ongoing service.

Making special collections more visible

Another way that OCLC is helping libraries increase their visibility on the Web is by automatically harvesting metadata about digitized special collections and adding it to WorldCat. In 2003, we implemented CONTENTdm, a software package that: 1) facilitates WorldCat access to photos, graphics and other objects in digitized special collections of libraries and other cultural heritage institutions; and 2) automatically harvests metadata from the collections for subsequent conversion at OCLC to the MARC format and loading into WorldCat. More than 100 institutions are now using this software to manage more than one million digital objects in their collections.

The Indiana Historical Society became the first institution to register one of its special collections for metadata harvesting by OCLC. Over the next few months, it will become possible for users to gain access to images in the Postcards of Indiana collection through links from WorldCat. To date, five more institutions have registered their special collections for metadata harvesting: Combined Arms Research Library, LOUIS: The Louisiana Digital Library, University of Oregon, Westminster College and Wisconsin Historical Society. These are important first steps in exposing rich special collections of libraries to searchers on the Web.

You can read more about the Open WorldCat pilot and the Indiana Historical Society in this issue of the OCLC Newsletter. I think you will agree that these projects are demonstrating the value that the global library network can bring to the information society. They should be worth mentioning at the next World Summit on the Information Society, which will be held in Tunis in 2005.

OCLC by the Numbers | Being relevant in a Web World