[Web4lib] re: WorldCat - libraries owning an item

[K.G. Schneider]

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.

--

Interesting. One of the features people talk about a lot for catalogs and
the like is "only show available items." Seems to me that if Worldcat is
operating as an uber-catalog, this would be a valuable feature-in other
words, don't put the pressure on local libraries to decide whether to
upload/not upload, but allow rules that affect Worldcat's display. Perhaps
this is on the docket.

Speaking of search logs (ok, we weren't, but I'm soaked in them right now),
because non-librarian users often think Librarians' Internet Index is a book
catalog (due to its somewhat misleading name), we get a lot of title/author
requests. That Worldcat box is going to be a fabuwonderful addition to our
new help/no-results pages. I would love to have a low-results page, as well.
For that matter, load common authors and titles and push the requests
directly to WorldCat, and/or reprocess requests via WC! Oh, I'm full of
ideas. Next year in Jerusalem. 

(If I step back and think about it, it still seems odd, and even perturbing,
that our professional catalog model is to have a bazillion nearly-identical
records-from the user's point of view, anyway-distributed across all these
unique databases. But that's too taxing a thought for Monday morning.)

Back to testing.

Karen G. Schneider
kgs at bluehighways.com