E-content in the OCLC cooperative

To whatever’s in your collection now, you need to start thinking about how you are going to put an “e” in front of it.

As the recent OCLC report, Five-Year Information Format Trends, confirms, a rapid migration to electronic information is under way. Over the next five years, library book spending and print journal publication, in general, are forecast to decline; only e-materials are projected to go up, and to go up dramatically. What may be surprising, however, is the growing amount of e-content that libraries have access to through the OCLC cooperative.

Let’s start with the cooperative’s most important piece of unique e-content—WorldCat. With more than 56 million bibliographic records and over 935 million location listings, WorldCat is the access point for a large quantity of e-content. Indeed, at June 30, 2004, WorldCat could direct users to:

• 75,035 e-books and 30,258 e-periodicals

• 26,905 objects (photos, maps, scores, manuscripts)

• 34,048 non-English Web sites

• 21,003 theses

• 6,583 juvenile Web sites.

Since 2001, FirstSearch users have been able to make use of evaluative content in WorldCat, including:

• 936,232 cover images

• 472,089 summaries

• 51,824 author notes

• 194,737 tables of contents

• 44,114 excerpts

The OCLC cooperative also provides CONTENTdm software for libraries to manage their digitized collections. In 2004, OCLC began harvesting metadata from CONTENTdm sites and adding it to WorldCat. From WorldCat, the user can link directly to the described objects. To date, we have loaded almost 10,000 records from 13 special collections. When you consider that there are more than three million objects residing on CONTENTdm sites, we have just begun to surface the valuable special collections of the OCLC cooperative.

Here are some more e-content statistics:

• NetLibrary provides access to more than 75,000 eBooks, and very soon will add some 1,000 audio books.

• The OCLC FirstSearch service provides access to 6.9 million e-articles from journals.

• OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online offers 1.9 million e-articles from 5,160 e-journals.

• The OCLC Digital Archive contains more than 3,000 digital objects.

• The QuestionPoint Global Knowledge Base contains more than 7,000 active question-and-answer pairs.

Clearly, the OCLC cooperative is moving beyond bibliography, and yet, bibliography seems more important than ever. Metadata continues to be critical to helping users get the content they want.

Indeed, the Open WorldCat pilot is demonstrating that good old WorldCat metadata out there on the Web has enormous potential. Since July, more than two million click-throughs a month are coming on Open WorldCat from Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN. Many users start out using a Web search engine and end up on library Web sites or catalogs.

Going forward, the OCLC cooperative must continue to foster more collaboration among diverse institutions and drive the development of standards that enable different systems and different organizations to connect with each other in the ever-expanding infosphere. Library users will expect seamless access to both traditional print materials as well as e-content.

As this Newsletter shows, e-content is vital to e-learning, and libraries have the opportunity to take a leading role in developing, organizing and providing access to e-content.

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