OAIster, PapersFirst and ProceedingsFirst added to WorldCat.org

Records from these three databases are now indexed in WorldCat.org and included in WorldCat.org search results:

OAIster

Photo used courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum Jazz Collection.

OAIster records are now fully accessible through WorldCat.org, and are included in standard WorldCat.org search results. OAIster is a union catalog of more than 23 million records that represent the open archives resources built by harvesting open archives digital collections worldwide.

Originally started at the University of Michigan in 2002, the database includes materials such as digitized books and articles, audio and video files, photos, data sets, theses and research papers.

There are also plans to release a freely accessible, discrete view of the OAIster records in January 2010 through a URL specific to OAIster.

To see how OAIster records look in WorldCat.org, see a sample search (limited to internet resources) on

• ti:temples bouddhiques
• kw:louis armstrong leon rene

PapersFirst and ProceedingsFirst

PapersFirst and ProceedingsFirst have now also been added to WorldCat.org results. These two indexes contain papers from conferences, symposiums and expositions worldwide. Created from items received by The British Library Document Supply Centre—you’ll find 7.4 million published items in English, French, Spanish and Chinese.

Use these sample searches to see how PapersFirst and ProceedingsFirst items look in WorldCat.org:

• Fighting fire with fire brain stimulation for the treatment of epilepsy (PapersFirst)
• Strategies towards sustainability of protected cultivation in mild winter climate (ProceedingsFirst)

WorldCat Registry adds contact visibility option

Now you can make specific contact information visible for anyone searching the WorldCat Registry, as long as you’re an authorized Registry user. Potential shared details include name, role, phone, e-mail, and fax. The change can help broaden visibility for key staff at your institution. Simply select a contact (or contacts) by checking the box “allow this contact to be visible to all” in the “Contacts” section of your library’s Registry profile.

On Facebook? Become a Fan of WorldCat on the new WorldCat Page. Then upload a photo, start a discussion, or post a question to the wall.

Library info pages now show library card sign up link and recent lists breakouts

Two new features were added to WorldCat.org this month that enhance the usefulness of your library info page on the site: the "Apply for a library card" link and new breakout categories on lists of recently-added items.

The "Apply for a library card" link (circled) is drawn from your library's WorldCat Registry profile in the "Name and Location" section, and the Recent items list breakouts (highlighted) are automatically generated for you each month, from your previous month's WorldCat holdings.

• Apply for a library card link
  Once you add a link to your online library card sign-up form through the WorldCat Registry, now WorldCat.org will display it for your users. So anyone who finds your library through WorldCat can immediately become an online borrower.

• Fiction/Juvenile breakouts on recent items lists
  Your library's monthly auto-generated list of items recently added to WorldCat just got even better—now there are 4 separate sublists for fiction, nonfiction, juvenile and nonjuvenile materials. You can point to this page from blog posts, newsletters—anywhere you want to highlight new content for specific readers. (Note that the "All items" list has an RSS feed on it. Soon the breakout categories will have individual RSS feeds, too.)

See both of these enhancements in action from the Huntington Beach Public Library's "info" page on WorldCat.org

More WorldCat news

Elsevier ScienceDirect articles now on WorldCat.org

Elsevier metadata for SCOPUS and ScienceDirect collections from 2006 to the present have now been indexed in WorldCat.org search results. This article-level metadata joins similar content such as the GPO Monthly Catalog, ArticleFirst, Medline, ERIC and the British Library Inside Serials. The ScienceDirect content corresponds to 1,800 journals, 150 book series and more than 1.3 million records.

Goodreads reviews are in

WorldCat has now added Goodreads reviews to help users evaluate materials with fellow readers' comments. You'll find Goodreads reviews in the "Reviews" section alongside WorldCat, WeRead, and Amazon reviews.

On Facebook? Become a Fan of WorldCat on the new WorldCat Page. Then upload a photo, start a discussion, or post a question to the wall.

The Credo Reference collection includes over three million entries from hundreds of well-regarded titles from over 70 of the world's best reference publishers.  Credo's collection is intelligently integrated with millions of cross-references and contains a wide range of subject-specific titles covering everything from art to accountancy, science to Shakespeare and law to literature plus dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias, quotations and atlases. 

When a record for a title from Credo Reference (OCLC symbol CREDO) is added or matched to WorldCat, a 938 field is added to the MARC record that contains the vendor code CRED.  This code is indexed; vendor records are searchable in Connexion using the vendor index (Vendor (vn:) in the dropdown menu).  Some examples of the records added to WorldCat from Credo Reference are OCLC numbers: #436848185, #437303088.  Some examples of records matched in WorldCat are OCLC numbers:  #428818194, #246969140.

For information about Credo Reference, see their web site at: http://www.credoreference.com.

See a list of all partners contributing records through the Vendor Record Contribution Program.

WorldCat Registry now includes library card field

Photo attribution: ilovelibraries.org
Library Card Sign-up

September is national library card sign-up month for libraries in the United States, so there’s no better time to take advantage of the latest new field added to the WorldCat Registry—the Library Card Form page. This new field lets you add the URL for your library card sign-up form to your Registry profile. Find it in the “Name and Location” section of your profile. Once you add it, soon new users who find your library through WorldCat.org will be able to apply for a library card immediately.

Add your library card sign-up form URL to your WorldCat Registry profile now >>

More WorldCat news

Facebook apps for back-to school

The WorldCat CiteMe app was recently recognized in the article, “Back to School: 15 Essential Web Tools for Students” by Mashable, the world's largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news. There are two Facebook apps for WorldCat:

• WorldCat – an app that lets you find items in WorldCat from right within Facebook
• CiteMe – an app that delivers formatted citations from WorldCat in one of 5 standard styles: APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA or Turabian.

  Add the apps to your library’s Facebook page today, and then check out the article for other good apps and tips to get back in the school swing of things.

The xISBN Web service supplies ISBNs and other information associated with an individual intellectual work represented in WorldCat. Submit an ISBN to this service, and it returns a list of related ISBNs and selected metadata.

The xISBN service is based on WorldCat, the world's largest network of library content and services.

With this new enhancement, you can now easily have all of your results link directly to the WorldCat.org item—which means if a user finds an item through your xISBN-powered app, they can now quickly locate it in a nearby library through WorldCat.org.

To enable automatic linking to WorldCat.org, simply add the argument "?fl=url" to the end of an xISBN request, like this:
http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/0596002815?fl=url
Get more details and gain access to xISBN through the WorldCat Affiliates page on the WorldCat.org Web site.

All WorldCat Local libraries in North America (Canada, US, Mexico) Central America, Caribbean, and South America that do not currently purchase content from Syndetic Solutions are eligible to participate in the trial that will continue through June 30, 2010.

Library staff members control access to the trial content in the >My WorldCat.org >User Interface Options section of the Service Configuration module. The new evaluative content is available now in WorldCat Local, but it will not display to users until the option to “Display Syndetics data?” is set to “Show” in Service Configuration.

Evaluative content included in the trial

The trial will surface six new evaluative content elements within the WorldCat Local interface. These elements include:

• Cover Art
• Reviews from Library Journal
• Reviews from Publisher’s Weekly
• First Chapters
• Descriptions / Summaries
• Table of Contents

For the purpose of this trial program, Syndetic Solutions has chosen to feature the six key content elements listed above. At the conclusion of the trial libraries may choose subscribe to these existing elements or add additional elements that include: fiction profiles, find similar titles, series list, first chapters, author notes, awards, Spanish and German content, video & music profiles and reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, Choice, Horn and Kirkus.

Next steps

The trial of Syndetic Solutions evaluative content in WorldCat Local will continue through June 30, 2010. Following the trial, WorldCat Local libraries may choose to add a subscription to this content to their WorldCat Local subscription for an additional charge.

Contact your OCLC Library Services Consultant for an estimate of the price of this add-on purchase for your library.

Library authorities in Bournemouth, Bath & NE Somerset, Bristol, North Somerset, Somerset, South Gloucestershire and Plymouth are working with OCLC to implement a discovery interface that will enable users to search and place reservations on materials held across the South West region. The service is a replacement for Wisdom, formerly supplied by DS Ltd, now part of the Axiell Group. By adopting this approach, the libraries will also raise their profile on the Web by becoming visible in WorldCat.org, the Web destination for discovery of library resources.

Rob Froud OBE, Head of Cultural Service at Somerset County Council and Chairman of the SWRLS Management Board said of the announcement: “We opted to work with OCLC because we sought a service our library customers would view instantly as highly attractive and easy-to-use. Our library staff are also served by having a solution that is technically robust and simple to implement.” Asked whether he felt other libraries in the region might join at a later stage, Mr Froud said: “Other libraries have expressed an intention to join and it is our hope they will do so soon, but we are very happy with the initial roll-out as it is another demonstration that the model of collaborative working across public library authorities is thriving.”

The libraries, through their participation in UnityUK, are already regularly updating their bibliographic and holdings information, which OCLC then uploads to WorldCat. This facilitated records transfer has opened up the potential for them to utilise services built on the WorldCat platform, including WorldCat Local. The seven SWRLS libraries will have their own individualised Web discovery interface reflecting their libraries’ branding and holdings switched on. Each interface will also present real-time holdings information from the other participating libraries to quicken the time it takes for users to locate items of interest. Requests will then be managed by the libraries’ underlying management systems, in this case Axiell’s Galaxy and Talis Alto. Inter-library loan requests by SWRLS libraries are managed by UnityUK.

The decision by libraries in the South West to adopt WorldCat Local as a shared service comes at a time when public libraries across the country are joining up service provision. In September, the Society of Chief Librarians announced an initiative to allow members of a library to borrow books from any of 4000 libraries in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. And, as has been widely reported, the government is planning a national request service backed up by home delivery in an attempt to reinvigorate the public’s perception of libraries.

Visit the OCLC Web site for more information on WorldCat Local.

About SWRLS
South Western Regional Library Service was founded in 1937 as a charitable organisation, and exists to act as an advocate for, and to promote cooperation between, the libraries across all sectors in the South West. There are currently 56 members of SWRLS, consisting of public library authorities, academic and special libraries and around 25,000 interlibrary loan transactions are carried out annually between them. For further information see the website at www.swrls.org.uk.

About OCLC
Founded in 1967 and headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, OCLC is a nonprofit library service and research organization that has provided computer-based cataloging, reference, resource sharing, eContent, preservation, library management and Web services to 71,000 libraries in 112 countries and territories. OCLC and its member libraries worldwide have created and maintain WorldCat, the world’s richest online resource for finding library materials. Search WorldCat.org on the Web at www.worldcat.org. For more information, visit www.oclc.org.

The Seattle Mashathon will follow the same format as previous events in Amsterdam and New York. Participants will spend the two days brainstorming and coding mash-ups with local systems and other Web services to take advantage of all that WorldCat, the world’s largest and most comprehensive bibliographic database, has to offer. Developers from the library community and beyond are encouraged to attend.

WorldCat includes materials from libraries around the world, including images, video games, movies, articles, books, maps and more.

Why attend the WorldCat Mashathon?

• Brainstorm potential apps for the WorldCat Search API, our bibliographic grouping services and other OCLC Web services.
• Get a preview of the new WorldCat Basic API.
• Gain development access to 1.4 billion items from more than 10,000 libraries worldwide.
• Integrate these resources with many others to create innovative new services.
• Meet fellow developers across the information industry.
• Share your creative vision and be a part of the next wave of online library development.

Roy Tennant of OCLC Research and longtime Code4Lib participant will kick off the session. OCLC staff will also be available for questions and breakout facilitation. Ideas, outcomes and code from the Mashathon, together with a participants list, will be shared during and after the event for others to download and build on.

Learn more and register now for the Mashathon >>

This new field, called "Library Card Form Page" lets you add the URL for your library card sign-up form to your Registry profile. Find it in the "Name and Location" section of your profile. Once you add it, new users who find your library through WorldCat.org will soon be able to apply for a library card immediately. (The Library Card Form Page URL does not yet appear on “library info” pages on WorldCat.org.)

Add your library card sign-up form URL to your WorldCat Registry profile now >>

The addition of Sudoc records in WorldCat, planned for the first quarter of 2010, will increase visibility of collections from the French academic world.

In addition to the valuable worldwide, online visibility of their records, participating in WorldCat brings the Sudoc libraries more benefits. "Thanks to their contribution, the libraries become OCLC members," says Raymond Bérard, director of the ABES, "and as such they can, for example, use the WorldCat API to develop their own specific applications. Further, as OCLC members, these Sudoc libraries can vote on a regional level in the OCLC governance structure."

"We are very pleased that ABES has agreed to contribute these records to WorldCat," says Rein van Charldorp, managing director of OCLC in Europe, Middle East and Africa. "OCLC has been working with ABES for more than 10 years now and this further extension of our cooperation is the logical next step. The worldwide library community will benefit significantly from the enrichment of WorldCat with the Sudoc titles."

The agreement to load Sudoc records into WorldCat follows that of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), which signed a similar agreement in June of this year. Since 2002, ABES has been cataloguing with Sudoc, which is based on OCLC's Central Bibliographic System (CBS). Loading CBS records into WorldCat makes possible the option for real-time updates from CBS into WorldCat, via SRU update, which is currently being used effectively for the Dutch union catalogue and the union catalogue of Australia.

With Sudoc records in the WorldCat database, these libraries are able to use other useful and efficient tools such as WorldCat Collection Analysis, which allows libraries to compare their collections with those of peer libraries. Visit the OCLC Web site to find more learn more about WorldCat.

About ABES
ABES (Agence Bibliographique de l'Enseignement Supérieur) is the agency in charge of Sudoc (Système Universitaire de documentation), the Library Union Catalogue for the academic, specialist and Higher Education in France. ABES was created in 1994 with the aim of implementing Sudoc, which was launched in 2001 and has proved very successful, representing in excess of 9 million records of 1,100 libraries and their 28 million holdings. ABES received over 34 million queries in 2008, which makes Sudoc a premier one-stop point for supporting teaching and research via a freely available integrated catalogue.

About OCLC
Founded in 1967 and headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, OCLC is a nonprofit library service and research organization that has provided computer-based cataloging, reference, resource sharing, eContent, preservation, library management and Web services to 71,000 libraries in 112 countries and territories. OCLC and its member libraries worldwide have created and maintain WorldCat, the world’s richest online resource for finding library materials. Search WorldCat.org on the Web.  For more information, visit the OCLC Web site.

As a distributor of all Brazilian university and academic presses, they have a large stock of out-of print books and periodicals and a fine collection of rare books. Their representatives are in all regions of Brazil and have arrangements with a few book dealers from Spanish-speaking neighboring countries which enable them to supply some selected titles from Latin America. They provide full library services of Brazilian materials in all subjects and their services include: approval plans, standing orders, serial subscriptions, new-titles bulletins, monographic ordering, full cataloging and minimal level records, shelf- ready processing and binding. For additional information about the Brazilian materials and library services that they provide, please contact Susan Bach Books at sbach@sbachbooks.com.br.

When a record for a title from Susan Bach Books (OCLC symbol SBACH) is added or matched to WorldCat, a 938 field is added to the MARC record that contains the vendor code BACH. This code is indexed; vendor records are searchable in Connexion using the vendor index (Vendor (vn:) in the dropdown menu). Some examples of the records added to WorldCat from Susan Bach Books are OCLC numbers: #435373729, #435373652. Some examples of records matched in WorldCat are OCLC numbers: #431939832, #428738409

More information on Susan Bach Books > >

View a list of all partners contributing records through the Vendor Record Contribution Program > >

With this functionality update, the eligibility requirements for the WorldCat Search API have also been updated.

New applications for the service will require that the library contributes to WorldCat and subscribes to WorldCat on FirstSearch or maintains a WorldCat subscription.

All of the more than 200 current WorldCat Search API WSKeys will remain active through at least Sept. 1, 2010. Any future request, however, will need to meet these new eligibility requirements.

Dawn Hendricks, WorldCat Search API product manager, explains that "current WorldCat Search API users are encouraged to continue creating new apps and mashups with the service to provide additional value for their libraries."

A new API for all: WorldCat Basic
OCLC announces its plans to offer a simple API into WorldCat for anyone and everyone in the world to use, for noncommercial use. Called the WorldCat Basic API, it will provide a mashable access point for lightweight apps built by developers who may or may not have ties to the library community.

Planned for release later this year, the WorldCat Basic API will use OpenSearch technology and return feeds in Atom and RSS. Results include OCLC number links to WorldCat.org, ISBNs and formatted citations.

"We have been wanting to do a completely open API to WorldCat for a long time now," remarks Roy Tennant, one of the OCLC Developer Network founders. "I am eager to see it in action."

Developers everywhere are encouraged to exercise their creativity to create new mash-ups that make use of WorldCat data through the APIs and other WorldCat widgets.

OCLC Web Services continue to offer ways to connect people with knowledge through libraries, and for libraries to reap the benefits of library cooperation.