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Opening up Open WorldCatIn early 2005, Open WorldCat will move from a pilot program to an ongoing feature on the OCLC FirstSearch service. It's been an interesting and exciting 18 months since we started this pilot to study the feasibility of making abbreviated WorldCat records and library holdings available to the general public on the Web. In the first part of the pilot, users could access links to Open WorldCat through selected Web sites, including Abebooks, Alibris, Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, BookPage, EBSCOhost, HCI Bibliography and ProQuest. Later in 2003, we notified member libraries that we were making a subset of 2 million abbreviated records from WorldCat available on the Google search service and, subsequently, on Yahoo! Search, with links to the Web-based catalogs and sites of some 12,000 academic, public and school libraries participating in OCLC. In November 2004, the general public did more than 5 million click-throughs from the Web to the Open WorldCat page, which directs them to library catalogs, Web sites and other resources. Library users have responded enthusiastically to the Open WorldCat capability. "Thanks to your Web site popping up in a search," one user wrote, "I found the book right on our campus and have it in my hands now!"
Also in November 2004, Open WorldCat began appearing prominently in Google Scholar (Beta), which enables Internet users to search scholarly literature. Users have the option of clicking from records in Google Scholar to the OCLC "Find in a Library" feature, which links them into the catalogs of nearby OCLC member libraries for service. Meanwhile, WorldCat keeps growing. On November 19, Baltimore Hebrew University added the 57 millionth record to WorldCat. This is the fourth Gold Record entered in 2004, which is itself a new record for WorldCat growth. It is also an indicator of augmented interest by member libraries and increased processing capabilities at OCLC. WorldCat is growing in new ways, too. Last April, the Indiana Historical Society became the first CONTENTdm institution to have its special collection metadata harvested by OCLC for subsequent loading into WorldCat. Since then, 16 CONTENTdm institutions have had 26 digital collections harvested and loaded. Thanks to Open WorldCat, these harvested special collections are more visible on the Web. As we continue to extend Open WorldCat to more partners and more venues, it becomes even more important that you continue to update your holdings in WorldCat in order to maximize the benefit that your library will reap from the Open WorldCat program. Clearly, the Open WorldCat program is consistent with OCLC’s chartered objective of increasing the availability of library resources. It is meeting our goal of weaving libraries into the Web and the Web into libraries. It is also demonstrating the power and potential of our new technological platform, which will enable WorldCat to move beyond bibliography into a globally networked, Web-based information resource that provides links to digital objects in other knowledge repositories. In short, we are making WorldCat more open and more available for research, scholarship and education than ever before.
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In
November 2004, Yahoo! Search and OCLC released a co-branded Internet toolbar
that enables people to use Yahoo! Search to explore both the Web and a subset
of 2 million abbreviated records from WorldCat. With the toolbar, Yahoo! users
can now choose to limit their search results to items held in OCLC libraries.
