Keeping WorldCat on the leading edge

With more than 180 million records and 1.5 billion location listings from libraries around the world, the scope and content of WorldCat are well-known.

Less well-known is the ongoing investment that libraries and OCLC make to ensure that WorldCat stays on the leading edge as a metadata resource.

Since 1971, OCLC has continuously upgraded and enhanced WorldCat and its cataloging service. Most recently, OCLC completed the migration of libraries to an entirely new cataloging platform in 2006, after a five-year development program. The current platform is based on open architectural models and supports not only MARC, but FRBR concepts, Dublin Core, ONIX and other standards, ensuring the vitality of this service for the future.

Quality and maintenance

Records that go into WorldCat are subject to continuous enhancement and conformance to changes in cataloging rules and standards. Responsibility for maintenance and enhancement of records in WorldCat is shared by the membership.

In fiscal 2009, for example, catalogers in 1,690 libraries, acting voluntarily, edited and replaced 108,766 records in WorldCat. Since 1983, catalogers in the 226 libraries in the Enhance program have voluntarily invested their time and expertise to make nearly three million improvements to records in WorldCat.

OCLC also invests in human and machine resources to monitor and enhance quality of WorldCat. In fiscal 2009, for example, WorldCat quality management staff enhanced 6,878,659 bibliographic records, added 1,106 new authority records and updated 1,123,925 authority records.

More recently, on February 2, OCLC installed a new version of its duplicate detection and resolution software that identifies and merges duplicate records in the database. The software detected and resolved 598,277 duplicate records in its first two months of operation.

Program for Cooperative Cataloging

OCLC also supports and participates in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), a chiefly North American collaborative effort coordinated by the Library of Congress that includes CONSER (cooperative online serials), NACO (name authorities), SACO (subject authorities) and BIBCO (monographic bibliographic records). The CONSER database, a valued source of high-quality records for serials, has resided in WorldCat since 1974. OCLC members that are NACO library contributors do their work at no charge through the NACO contribution service, which is part of WorldCat cataloging. In 2009, OCLC’s NACO libraries contributed over half of the new records to LC’s Name Authorities file. Nearly all of the approximately 500 libraries in all PCC programs do their work through WorldCat cataloging.

Virtual International Authority File

OCLC Research participates in the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) project, whose long-term goal is to include authoritative names from many libraries in a new global service that will be freely available via the Web to users worldwide. Current participants, in addition to OCLC, are: Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Egypt), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (Germany), ICCU (Italy), Library of Congress, Narodni Knihovna (Czech Republic), National Library of Australia, National Library of Israel, National Library of Portugal, National Library of Spain, National Library of Sweden, Swiss National Library and the Vatican Library.

Tomorrow’s cataloging platform

In the longer term, OCLC is building next-generation cataloging and collections management on a service-neutral data platform. The platform will permit not only integration with WorldCat Local and Web-scale Management Services, but will also support use by other, external applications for collections and metadata management. Whichever approach the member library chooses, WorldCat data will be a central asset that supports further efficiencies in library workflows, reduces library costs and improves the library user’s experience with discovery and delivery.

OCLC’s next-generation cataloging includes:

• an open cataloging and metadata platform that supports the organization, discovery, delivery and management of the myriad collections now delivered by libraries to their communities—not only physical collections housed in library buildings or storage facilities, but also licensed electronic and digital collections (both digitized and born-digital)
• functionality to efficiently create, manage and share metadata both at the collection level and at the level of a single information object
• shared metadata creation and management not only for individual titles and works, but also for people, places, concepts and other types of information objects
• easy, fast ways to ingest an OCLC cataloging subscriber’s data and keep member holdings synchronized with WorldCat
• a vibrant, worldwide Expert Community working with OCLC to extend and improve WorldCat
• continuous improvement in quality of WorldCat data for catalogers, end-users and a variety of other constituencies.

Over the last 39 years, WorldCat has evolved from an aggregation of bibliographic records and holdings into a dynamic network that creates new connections and opportunities for libraries and their users.

We at OCLC remain committed to keeping WorldCat on the leading edge as we pursue our mission of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing library costs.

Jay Jordan
OCLC President and Chief Executive Officer

Contents | Metadata everwhere