Open WorldCat Pilot: A User's Perspective

[Laura Cohen]

Chip and Mike:

Interesting posting. This leads me to a couple of questions about the
financial side of things.

1. Now that you've begun the process of handing over WorldCat to successful
businesses that will provide free access to its contents, when will OCLC
stop charging libraries (who of course provide this content) for access to
WorldCat through FirstSearch? 

2. What, if any, financial gain is OCLC receiving from its partnership with
Google, Yahoo and other partners? This would be of interest to those of us
following open access scholarship.

------------------------------------------
Laura B. Cohen
Library Web Administrator
LI-140 University at Albany
Albany, NY 12222
Tel:  (518) 442-3492  Fax: (518) 442-3567



Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 13:23:49 -0500
From: "Teets,Mike" <teetsm at oclc.org>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Subject: RE: Open WorldCat Pilot: A User's Perspective
Message-ID:
<35A72025A61EE3488E4CF824C717F70EA607FB at OAEXCH1SERVER.oa.oclc.org>

Open WorldCat is a work in progress.  We launched the project almost one
year ago with a simple goal -- to help libraries make their collections
visible and available at the point of need on the open Web.  Since that
time, we've made a number of enhancements, some planned and others in
response to requests from the membership/library community.   

Some recent developments:

-  A few weeks ago, we posted the entire Worldcat collection of 57 million
records for harvesting by the search engines. (Before then, only 2 million
records were available for harvest.) Additional records will begin appearing
as the search engines incorporate them into their
systems.   

-  Earlier in November, we added hot linked subject headings that users can
follow to view a list of all items with the same subject heading in Open
WorldCat, in order to facilitate subject access to WorldCat.  

-  In December and January we will begin adding features to address the
issue addressed in the post below regarding grouping holdings for multiple
iterations/versions of an item.  These features will include the ability to
retrieve and see holdings for other items with the same author & title and,
possibly, hot-linked author and titles.  We are also thinking about
applications of XISBN, which returns a list of associated ISBNs for a given
ISBN, and the FRBR algorithm for reducing duplicate records.  

- In the next few weeks, we will be providing a section of the Open Worldcat
informational page featuring user contributed "cool tools" based on Open
Worldcat.  It will be at the same location
http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/open/default.htm

-  On an ongoing basis, we are talking regularly with potential new partners
for Open WorldCat and are actively building our directories of OPAC and
OpenURL links, in an effort to improve the likelihood that user who
encounters Open WorldCat will be able to get to a local libraries catalog or
OpenURL resolver for service. (Any OCLC member library can update their
links at https://www3.oclc.org/app/openwc/ )  We are also doing some manual
creation of these links as time allows.

This has been a very interesting project for us at OCLC.  We hope that it is
providing the community with a valuable service, and that it is also serving
as a catalyst for further exploration of the huge potential for
collaboration that we believe exists between libraries and open Web
information sites.  We are very happy to see the interest the project has
generated, through discussion like this one, comments from users, and the
rapid growth in activity we've seen over the past few months. Libraries
obviously have a central role to play in public access to information, and
it is our job to help in any way that we can.  

Chip Nilges, nilgesc at oclc.org
Executive Director, WorldCat Content & Global Access

Mike Teets, teetsm at oclc.org
Executive Director, Product Architecture and Development

------------------------------------------
Laura B. Cohen
Library Web Administrator
LI-140 University at Albany
Albany, NY 12222
Tel:  (518) 442-3492  Fax: (518) 442-3567