WorldCat

WorldCat
Five-color WorldCat emblem, with WorldCat in black letters and OCLC in smaller grey letters
Type of site
 Network of library content and services
Available in 13 languages[1]
Owner Online Computer Library Center
Website www.worldcat.org
Alexa rank Increase 3,446 (Global 03/2017)
Commercial No
Registration Optional, but some features require registration (such as writing reviews and making lists or bibliographies)
Launched January 21, 1998 (1998-01-21)[2]
Current status Online
Content license
 Copyright policy
IP address 132.174.11.84
OCLC number 756372754

WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories[3] that participate in the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.[4] The subscribing member libraries collectively maintain WorldCat's database.

History

OCLC was founded in 1967 under the leadership of Fred Kilgour.[5] That same year, OCLC began to develop the union catalog technology that would later evolve into WorldCat; the first catalog records were added in 1971.[5][6] It contains more than 330 million records, representing over 2 billion physical and digital assets in 485 languages, as of November 2014.[3] It is the world's largest bibliographic database. OCLC makes WorldCat itself available free to libraries, but the catalog is the foundation for other subscription OCLC services (such as resource sharing and collection management). In 2003, OCLC began the "Open WorldCat" pilot program, making abbreviated records from a subset of WorldCat available to partner web sites and booksellers, to increase the accessibility of its subscribing member libraries' collections. In 2006, it became possible to search WorldCat directly at its website. In 2007, WorldCat Identities began providing pages for 20 million "identities", predominantly authors and persons who are the subjects of published titles.[7]

Model

WorldCat operates on a batch processing model rather than a real-time model. That is, WorldCat records are synchronized at intermittent intervals with the underlying library catalogs instead of real-time or every day. Consequently:

As an alternative, WorldCat allows participating institutions to add direct links from WorldCat to their own catalog entries for a particular item, which enables the user to determine its real-time status. However, this still requires users to open multiple Web pages, each pointing to a different OPAC with its own distinctive user interface design (which places item status in a different portion of the Web browser display), until they can locate a catalog entry that shows the item is currently available at a particular library.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Search for library items". WorldCat. Online Computer Library Center. Retrieved 2017-03-29.
  2. ↑ "WorldCat.org WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info - DomainTools". WHOIS. Retrieved 2017-01-21.
  3. 1 2 "A global library resource". Online Computer Library Center. Retrieved January 24, 2014.
  4. ↑ "What is WorldCat?". worldcat.org. Retrieved 13 February 2015.
  5. 1 2 Margalit Fox (August 2, 2006). "Frederick G. Kilgour, Innovative Librarian, Dies at 92". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-12-22. Frederick G. Kilgour, a distinguished librarian who nearly 40 years ago transformed a consortium of Ohio libraries into what is now the largest library cooperative in the world, making the catalogs of thousands of libraries around the globe instantly accessible to far-flung patrons, died on Monday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 92.
  6. ↑ "A brief history of WorldCat". oclc.org. February 10, 2015. Retrieved February 13, 2014.
  7. ↑ Hickey, Thomas B. (15 April 2007). "WorldCat Identities: Another View of the Catalog" (PDF). NextSpace. OCLC (6): 18–19. ISSN 1559-0011. Retrieved 18 January 2016.

Further reading

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