Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: A billion holdings

A billion holdings

August 11, 2005 • Categories: Metadata , OCLC

The OCLC website is now carrying details of the billionth holding in WorldCat. It was entered by Worthington Libraries for The Monkees: the day-by-day story of the '60s TV pop sensation

There are more details on the WorldCat page, including a list of libraries who contributed holdings on either side of the billionth one!

This is a major milestone based on the holdings of thousands of libraries worldwide! It is the richest source of book data that we have, as well as a major reservoir of data about music, maps, sound and video recordings.

An important note: a holding is not an individual copy. If a library has one hundred copies of the latest Harry Potter this counts as one holding.

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2 comments so far

Posted by Roy Tennant on August 12, 2005

Congratulations to the OCLC collaborative for such a remarkable milestone! WorldCat is such a remarkable resource of which all librarians can be proud. While others played in their own sandboxes, librarians collaborated to build the single largest database of its kind. I've also been greatly encouraged to see what OCLC is doing with this resource to make it more widely available to the world at large. Through you, libraries of all sizes everywhere can appear to be huge. Rock on!

Posted by Simon Jennings on August 12, 2005

Congratulations! A highly relevant billionth entry given the Monkees song titles which might be seen as references to the scale of the achievement and its collaborative nature:

Take A Giant Step

Little Bit Me A Little Bit You

Look out (Here Comes Tomorrow)

Not quite so sure how the "The Porpoise Song" might be applicable...