A WorldCat community

Using WorldCat.org to build a social network of the world’s library users

By Tom Storey

Online ratings, tags, reviews, recommendations, lists, rankings, personal profiles—the social media revolution is here. It seems the world has exploded with Web 2.0, social networking tools and sites.

Some of the signs?

• Social networking behemoth MySpace attracted more than 114 million global visitors age 15 and older in June 2007, a 72-percent increase versus a year ago according to comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world.

• The number of average daily visitors to Facebook was 15 million, up 300 percent from a year earlier, and users averaged 3½ hours per visit.

• Google’s October 2006 acquisition for $1.65 billion of video juggernaut YouTube, which had 189 million visitors in June 2007. Each day, YouTube users view more than 100 million video clips and create some 65,000 new videos.

Social networking is more than a fad as hundreds of millions of people around the world visit social networking sites each month. It is an activity that is being woven into the very fabric of the global Internet.

OCLC wants to establish a social network of the world’s library users with WorldCat.org. Jasmine de Gaia, Global Product Manager, Social Networking Initiatives, notes that in the online user landscape, there has been a change in expectations, especially the level of involvement.

“Users want a better experience with more value,” she says. “They want to be involved with creating and organizing new content. A shift to user-generated content is clearly evident in the information space. The library community has an opportunity to build services into its systems that encourage users to contribute their expertise to the cooperative.”

“Enriching WorldCat with user-contributed content enriches library catalogs. The ability for online users to contribute content will make them more dedicated stakeholders to the library and their library experience more meaningful.”

Among the new, interactive social networking tools that have been added to WorldCat.org:

• Personal profiles. These free, “My WorldCat” accounts allow users to establish online profiles to provide greater detail about themselves. Users create identities by listing name, location, interests, occupation, photos, e-mail address, library affiliation and links to other accounts, such as personal Web pages, RSS feeds or instant messaging addresses. Providing this personal information is optional, and users can control the public availability of their e-mail addresses or their entire profiles via privacy settings. All a user needs is an e-mail address to create a WorldCat account.

• Create and share lists. Users can add items cataloged in WorldCat to personalized lists. Users can build as many lists as they like on any subject—recommended mystery novels, favorite children’s books, best jazz CDs, top professional reading. They can group items owned by their library and other WorldCat libraries, and share their lists with friends, colleagues and millions of site users. Or they can keep their lists private.

• Ratings and reviews. WorldCat.org users can add content, such as factual notes, tables of contents, ratings and critiques, under the Details and Reviews tabs for any item. Detail notes remain freely editable by all users, while reviews can be revised only by their original authors. Users can return at anytime, log in and create or revise content. Guidelines are provided.

• Citation management. Item records in WorldCat.org include a“Cite this Item” link that provides bibliographic citations in five common styles: APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA and Turabian. Displayed in a separate pop-up window, the citations follow the reference standard for each style. Users may copy and paste the needed format into a bibliography. Users may also generate citations for an entire list of items in one of the five formats or export the list as desired.

Those tools that will be added in the future:

• Social tagging. This is a type of collaborative categorization using informally assigned, user-defined keywords. Folksonomy tags are assigned by users “on the fly” and are extremely popular as a grassroots way to organize the digital world of Web pages, blogs, video clips, photo sharing sites—where millions of items are generated on an hourly basis. The intent of tagging is to make a body of electronic information increasingly easy to search, discover and navigate. WorldCat.org users will be able to virtually label records and lists of books, eBooks, audiobooks, DVDs, CDs, online articles, music scores—anything found in WorldCat. There will be no limit to the number of tags users can assign to an item. And users will be able to view other users’ tags to see which tag words get the best responses from the WorldCat community, and do their own tagging accordingly.

• Recommender service. Users will have the ability to receive and contribute recommendations through a variety of data sources, including metadata, activity tracking, lists, ratings/reviews, circulation data and expert opinions.

• RSS feeds/notifications. Feeds are commonly understood as the aggregation of update notices for Web sites and services and are commonly grouped under the acronym RSS, though other technologies and standards may be used to effect the same user experience. WorldCat.org will offer RSS feeds that continuously push or pull defined sets of information out of WorldCat.

Users want a better experience, they want to be involved and they want more value. Social functions in WorldCat are a step forward in that direction.

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