[Web4lib] RE: WorldCat - libraries owning an item

[Melissa Willer]

Tom,

I know we had quite a surprise when we started searching in the Worldcat box
- many, if not most of our new materials did not show up.  

It turns out that how your holdings show up, or do not, is largely dependent
on how and when you upload your holdings to OCLC. 

We have been batchloading our uploads quarterly, which I knew, but I did not
know that we were also not uploading any items that had been added less than
6 months before to help cut down on how many unfillable requests we
received.  (Unfortunately, it seems a lot of libraries do not vet their ILL
requests against lending library policies and frequently request items that
are not allowed, i.e. reference materials, or AV from out of state
libraries.) Items that we do not add holdings to in OCLC (via uploading or
during the cataloging process) do not show in Worldcat.

We are in a consortium environment, so I spoke to our office and changed our
settings, so we will be uploading all holdings on a monthly basis and not
restricting what materials upload. SO in a week or so all of our holdings
added before August 1 should show up in Worldcat. We'll see how that affects
our ILL requests.

The other thing they told me is that OCLC allows you to set up "Auto
Deflection" for certain material formats. So, if your library does not ILL
visual materials, all bib records with the format "visual" will not show in
firstsearch.  Our office feels that this will also affect what shows up in
the public version of Worldcat but I cannot confirm this as we do not
restrict items in this way.

On some level I agree with you; it would be nice if there was a disclaimer,
or some direct referral back to your home library. But, I personally see
this as the libraries' Amazon service - and you don't see a disclaimer
anywhere on Amazon that all of vendor's items might not appear when you
search their catalog.  

If you are concerned I would certainly check how you are getting your data
to OCLC, and whether your policies are inadvertently creating problems down
the line.

Melissa Willer
Circulation and Technical Services Department Head
Bloomingdale Public Library


Message: 5
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 07:26:32 -0700
From: "Thomas Zimoski" <tzimoski at gmail.com>
Subject: [Web4lib] WorldCat - libraries owning an item 
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Message-ID:
	<6098f65d0608140726g5e243e5yf6208006e2268405 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

At least for the library system to which my local public library
belongs, the "libraries owning this item" information in WorldCat is
quite incomplete.  Whether our situation is unusual and whether the
WorldCat administrators have provided a feasible mechanism for
correcting this situation I do not know.

But it  bothers me that there is no  indication on the WorldCat site
that their holdings information may be incomplete and that it might be
productive to search your local library's catalog directly.

I'm interested in the impressions of  others as to how completely your
library's collection is represented in WorldCat.

Tom