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

[Teets,Mike]

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

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of D.H. Mattison
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2004 12:57 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] RE: Open WorldCat Pilot: A User's Perspective

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