Hillsdale College
Improve discovery of your entire collection
"We have title-level OCLC cataloging for most of our subscribed databases, which is amazing. ...It has drastically improved discovery."
Maurine McCourry, Technical Services Librarian
Mossey Library at Hillsdale College, a long-time OCLC member, has remained dedicated to maintaining its holdings in WorldCat®. Technical Services Librarian Maurine McCourry explained, "When electronic resources started becoming a big part of our collection, I really wanted to continue that to make sure that our electronic holdings were reflected as fully as our print holdings in WorldCat." The staff found this difficult to do with their previous solutions, but WorldShare® Collection Manager has made it significantly easier.
"We're able to show what we have in electronic packages—as well as in print—all in WorldCat," Maurine said. Even better, they're able to get high-quality WorldCat records into their local catalog. "Our individual library catalog benefits from the quality of records," she added. "The OCLC records are vetted both by OCLC and by member libraries pretty extensively. Even the worst OCLC records are better than most of the records you're going to get from vendors just because it's done by libraries."
"If it's something that we're paying for, you're going to be able to find it in our catalog. That's the advantage to getting WorldCat records in the catalog with reliable, good quality metadata."
While library users certainly benefit from the ability to easily find the resources they need, it's the reference librarians that Maurine hears from most often. "A Spanish professor here at the college needed a dictionary of medieval Spanish," one reference librarian told her, and she didn't expect that the library would be able to supply it. "She did a subject search in the catalog, just to make sure, and it turns out we had a record from HathiTrust. Because it was an OCLC record with full MARC cataloging and LC Subject Headings, she was able to find it. And it would not have been there if it was not for the WorldCat knowledge base."
WorldShare Collection Manager makes it easy for the library to maintain robust records for open-access and licensed collections in the Mossey catalog through automatic updates. "We have all of our e-collections marked as held in the knowledge base, and we have MARC records delivered. We download those, collection by collection, on a periodic basis," Maurine said. "Having an OCLC record linked in the knowledge base is extremely important to us so that we can match it up to our catalog."
Maurine sees this advancement as key to OCLC's founding principles of expanding access to library materials and reducing the rate of rise of library costs. "Saving libraries money, saving libraries time, and really contributing to a global union catalog," she said, "I really think has a worldwide public good. And I think we have a responsibility as a profession to strive for that."
Services used by Hillsdale College
- Collection contains more than 952,000 volumes, including more than 305,000 e-resources and many full-text e-journal titles
- Participates in MelCat (Michigan eLibrary Catalog) with more than 400 other Michigan libraries to offer 47 million resources to users
- Special collections include the personal library of economist Ludwig von Mises and a significant collection of first edition books
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