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Fellowship experience broadens the family WorldCat.org: Advanced citations Moving our global cooperative forward Expanding research opportunities for the cooperative The next steps toward Web scale Three new ways to experience WorldCat.org Download this issue (3.56 MB pdf)
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Three new ways to experience WorldCat.orgBy Andy Havens One of the goals of WorldCat.org is to support the discovery of library resources in as many data environments as possible. Getting library resources into the everyday “stream” of users’ knowledge-seeking activities helps position libraries as integral parts of the information landscape. Three new WorldCat.org applications help do just that, making more library data available to more people in more ways than ever.
1. #Ask4Stuff is a new, Twitter-based service that returns a WorldCat search when you send a tweet with the tag #Ask4Stuff. Send the following tweet from your account: #Ask4Stuff back to school and you’ll get a tweet back that says something like: @OCLC A few things about back to school in #Ask4Stuff, check out http://is.gd/eAQwy That link will take you to the WorldCat.org search result for “back to school.” You can even localize the result to a WorldCat Local instance by including the local library name as another hash tag. For example:
Many people use Twitter for reminders or notes to their peers. You can use Twitter to share a search with your social network and mark it with other hash tags. Or you can store the results in your Tweet stream just like bookmarks, saving a thought to work on later from another device. Try an #Ask4Stuff search from your Twitter account to see how it works for yourself. 2. WorldCat Genres allows you to browse dozens of genres for thousands of titles, authors, subjects, characters, locations and more, ranked by popularity in the world’s libraries. It is a joint experiment from OCLC Research and the WorldCat.org team. Select categories include:
In addition, there are dozens of other specific categories and hundreds of specific subjects. Results let you drill down further by investigating related WorldCat lists, genre-specific awards, movies and TV shows, and related imaginary characters and places, as well as real people and locations. See for yourself. 3. A new WorldCat Mobile site lets users search libraries for books, music, movies, games and more, all from the browser of smart phones like the iPhone and Android devices. Previously, access to a mobile version of WorldCat.org was handled specifically through iPhone and Android apps from third-party providers. While those apps are still available, this new mobile version of WorldCat.org is site-based, available from any mobile device with a compatible browser. Along with information about library materials, the mobile site provides location, contact and map data for participating libraries. Set your mobile browser to www.worldcat.org/m and give it a try yourself.
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