Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Worldcat.org appears

Worldcat.org appears

Worldcat.org has gone live. This is a major step: it consolidates access to the collections and services of thousands of libraries on the open web. 1.3 billion items in approximately 18,000 libraries worldwide, and growing.

There is a downloadable search box to add to your own page. The syntax for linking into worldcat.org is simplified and more memorable.

http://worldcat.org/isbn/0679454438
http://worldcat.org/isbn/0394574400&loc=43214

Its appearance is a tribute to the hard work of many colleagues across OCLC and the leadership of Chip Nilges and Mike Teets. You will notice that it is flagged as beta. This is a beginning: there is a clear schedule of improvement and augmentation for coming months. We want it to be a compelling experience for library users, and to be able to connect them to collections and services effectively. We also hope that it will become a compelling venue through which libraries will want to disclose those collections and services on the open web. For libraries, participation in WorldCat and associated registries means that their collections and services will be visible at Worldcat.org, through Google and Yahoo, and through other partner sites (Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Live, for example).

Increasingly, we see WorldCat as a resource which drives a range of application services: cataloging, resource sharing, collection analysis, end-user discovery and others.

There is a feedback form on the site which we hope to see heavily used!

Update: for some editing and changes to ISBNs.

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7 comments so far

Posted by Roy Tennant on August 7, 2006

Congratulations! This is so cool. Kudos to everyone who must have worked so hard on it.

Posted by Trish on August 7, 2006

Have you considered linking this button to Google Books? Giving people the option of purchasing through Amazon or finding it in a library near them, or would Google not be receptive to this idea?

Thanks,
Trish Losi

Posted by Tito Sierra on August 7, 2006

Very nice interface, and fast! Any plans for "limit to what's available in my library" searching?

Posted by Jeff Heynen on August 8, 2006

Imagine the potential value of a worldcat search box on MySpace!

Jeff

Posted by Matt Pasiewicz on August 8, 2006

It looks great! I would love to have the ability to save a search as an RSS feed.

Posted by Lorcan Dempsey on August 11, 2006

Trish: GBS links to Worldcat for books originating in the library scanning initiative. We hope that they will link from more, or all, books further downstream.

Tito: the ability to scope to a single library's holdings is on the roadmap for this intiative.

Posted by Philipp Mayr on September 11, 2006

Can you possibly say how much of the Worldcat documents are indexed by public search engine like Google? How often do they repeat?