WorldCat: Facing the Future Open WorldCat Considerations
- Expand partnerships
- Limited indexing by partners
- Continued difficulty finding items (unless aware of necessary "find in a library" syntax)
- Low placement in search economy could be improved by increased linking participation by libraries to WorldCat.org results
WorldCat.org Considerations
- Still in Beta
- Continue improving relevancy ranking algorithm and site features based on user feedback
- Gaining user loyalty and participation in social components of the site
- WorldCat.org facilitates keyword searching
- Limited to FirstSearch subscribers
What's next for OCLC's WorldCat?
OCLC to pilot WorldCat Local press release April 11, 2007 by OCLC.
OCLC's WorldCat Local: A Promising Development for Library Patrons posted April 23, 2007 by Barbara Quint on Information Today News Breaks
WorldCat: Think locally, act globally posted April 12, 2007 by Tim Spaulding on the Thingology blog.
Why should Catalogers care?
Catalogers know the importance of providing users with multiple access points. Placing library data into new contexts such as the open Web has the potential to greatly augment access to this data. In order for this potential to be realized and for the movement of WorldCat.org’s data onto the open Web to have significant impact on users and the value of libraries, Boyd asserts libraries must move forward in two ways: catalogers must continue providing full and accurate records and libraries must enable deep linking to their catalogs so users can jump straight from the web into the relevant record [for example, setting up deep linking into the catalog from WorldCat.org] (p. 4). Simply making the data available to users is not enough—the data must be manipulated to maintain and capitalize on its underlying bibliographic organization in ways that users find accessible.
In sum, catalogers and cataloging services will continue to be invaluable participants in effectual information organization. Catalogers create records by combining cataloging rules with knowledge of how the recorded data will enable users to find, gather, select, evaluate, and navigate items. These records provide the foundations of catalogs, and each carefully recorded piece of data must be put to work in serving users. Open WorldCat and WorldCat.org make use of the bibliographic information that catalogers have been recording for decades. In this way, these OCLC cats are valuable tools that will help libraries reap the benefits of the networked era, as long as the libraries subscribe to FirstSearch, of course.
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