[WEB4LIB] RE: Open WorldCat Pilot: A User's Perspective

[D.H. Mattison]

Google Scholar includes all of the existing Open WorldCat database. If you
include "site:worlcatlibraries.org" as part of your search string in either
a global Google or Google Scholar search, you'll limit your results to just
the Open WorldCat database crawled by Google and Yahoo! Yahoo! has a nice
special edition of its toolbar that lets you do specific searches of Open
WorldCat with one click. You have to download it from OCLC
(http://www.oclc.org/toolbar/default.htm).

Nancy's article made it abundantly clear to me that the lack of and accuracy
of existing public library holdings are a huge issue with Open WorldCat. She
also makes this statement near the end:

"The most glaring problem is the fact that the record(s) retrieved are not
always those that show the holdings of the local library. Obviously,
libraries enter records for various iterations of an item, and those items
become different records. Searching Open WorldCat retrieves only a few
records for an item, not all of them. OCLC recognizes this as a problem."

David Mattison
Victoria, BC, Canada
dmattison at shaw.ca
Tiki Wiki Hut: http://www.davidmattison.ca/tiki
Ten Thousand Year Blog: http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org]On Behalf Of Drew, Bill
Sent: December 1, 2004 4:38 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] RE: Open WorldCat Pilot: A User's Perspective


The article misses some important things.  Public libraries are almost
entirely excluded because many do not have holdings in WorldCat.
Interesting article.  I tried several of the searches on Google.  Works
very well.  Should be interesting when combined with Google Scholar!

Bill Drew