Records from Museums Added to WorldCat

OCLC has added more than 10,000 metadata records from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to the OCLC WorldCat database.

The metadata records describe art objects owned by the museums and also display thumbnail images of the objects. WorldCat includes items held in libraries, museums and other cultural heritage organization and makes those records available to researchers worldwide.

Both the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston also are CAMIO contributors. CAMIO, the Catalog of Art Museum Images Online, offers a single point of entry to premier art collections owned by leading museums worldwide. OCLC will continue to work with CAMIO contributors to add their metadata records and thumbnail images to WorldCat.

In WorldCat.org, a subscriber of the CAMIO database will be able to click on the thumbnail of the art image to access the high-resolution file of the image. All of the high-quality art images in CAMIO have been rights-cleared for education use. CAMIO showcases a wide range of fine and decorative art and provides high-quality art images for students, faculty, researchers and library visitors to use in art history and studio art programs, as well as lectures, presentations and class projects.

“By loading these records—as well as those from CONTENTdm digital collections—into WorldCat, museums, libraries and other cultural heritage organizations are providing increased visibility to their unique collections on the Web. WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local facilitate discovery of these special collections by students, faculty and researchers worldwide searching the Web, providing maximum visibility,” said Greg Zick, OCLC Vice President, OCLC Digital Collection Services.

OCLC will continue to grow the WorldCat database as a global resource. With WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local, OCLC’s goal is to connect people on the Web, not only to libraries and their collections, but to museums’ collections and unique collections from other cultural heritage organizations.

(2008 07 01)