WorldCat

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WorldCat
Five-color WorldCat emblem, with WorldCat in black letters and OCLC in smaller grey letters
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Screenshot
300px
WorldCat homepage as of June 2019
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Commercial? No
Type of site
Network of library content and services
Registration Optional, but some features require registration (such as writing reviews and making lists or bibliographies)
Available in
  • Chinese (Simplified)
  • Chinese (Traditional)
  • Czech
  • Dutch
  • English
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Korean
  • Japanese
  • Portuguese
  • Spanish
  • Thai
  • Urdu
Content license
Copyright policy
Owner OCLC
Launched January 21, 1998; 26 years ago (1998-01-21) (date of registry of the new domain name; the database already existed since 1971)[1]
Current status Online

WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative.[2] It is operated by OCLC, Inc.[3] Many of the OCLC member libraries collectively maintain WorldCat's database, the world's largest bibliographic database.[4] The database includes other information sources in addition to member library collections.[5] 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). WorldCat is used by librarians for cataloging and research and by the general public.

History

OCLC was founded in 1967 under the leadership of Fred Kilgour.[6] 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.[6][7]

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.[8][9]

In October 2005, the OCLC technical staff began a wiki project, WikiD, allowing readers to add commentary and structured-field information associated with any WorldCat record.[10] WikiD was later phased out, although WorldCat later incorporated user-generated content in other ways.[11][12]

In 2006, it became possible for anyone to search WorldCat directly at its open website,[13] not only through the subscription FirstSearch interface where it had been available on the web to subscribing libraries for more than a decade before.[14] Options for more sophisticated searches of WorldCat have remained available through the FirstSearch interface.[13]

In 2007, WorldCat Identities began providing pages for 20 million "identities", which are metadata about names—predominantly authors and persons who are the subjects of published titles.[15]

In 2017, OCLC's WorldCat Search API was integrated into the cite tool of Wikipedia's VisualEditor, allowing Wikipedia editors to cite sources from WorldCat easily.[16][17]

Beginning in 2017, OCLC and the Internet Archive have collaborated to make the Internet Archive's records of digitized books available in WorldCat.[18]

As of February 2021, WorldCat contained over 512 million bibliographic records in 483 languages, representing over 3 billion physical and digital library assets,[3] and the WorldCat persons dataset (mined from WorldCat) included over 100 million people.[19]

System architecture

Local catalogs of many OCLC member libraries are intermittently synchronized with the WorldCat database.[20] WorldCat allows participating institutions to add direct links from WorldCat to their own local catalog entries for particular items, which enables the user to click through to the local catalog to quickly determine an item's real-time status (for example, whether or not it is checked out).[21]

In a small percentage of libraries,[22] the local catalog is also run by OCLC using an integrated library system called WorldCat Discovery and WorldShare Management Services.[23]

Library contributions to WorldCat are made via the Connexion computer program,[24] which was introduced in 2001; its predecessor, OCLC Passport, was phased out in May 2005.[25] Cataloging librarians may also use the WorldShare Record Manager[26] or WorldCat Metadata API[27] for similar purposes.[28]

See also

References

  1. 1998 is the date of registry of the WorldCat.org domain; see: Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. However, the union catalog that became WorldCat was started three decades earlier, and it was already available on the web to subscriber libraries at OCLC.org several years before WorldCat.org was a registered domain name; see: Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. The 2012–2013 OCLC Annual Report noted that the number of "participating libraries (includes active and inactive symbols)" was 78,985: Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  22. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. For another source of statistics on library system market share, see: Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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Further reading

  • Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  • Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  • Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. See also: Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. Information about licensing of WorldCat records and some other OCLC data.

External links

  • No URL found. Please specify a URL here or add one to Wikidata.
  • Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. Information on the OCLC website about WorldCat.
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