Putting the World in WorldCat

OCLC has been increasingly successful at establishing partnerships with national libraries around the world.  We introduced a new set of Web pages devoted to national libraries  recently.  The new Web site's timeline charts the progress of national library participation, indicating for example that the first national library outside North America, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands), began its partnership with OCLC in 1978. Today, over thirty national libraries are participating in the cooperative.

The national libraries' Web site's most interesting feature is perhaps its interactive WorldMap, which began as a project of the OCLC Office of Research. The map shows the national libraries that participate in the OCLC cooperative by contributing data to WorldCat. You begin by clicking on a country -- say,  Sweden -- and the map zooms in, revealing a link to that country's national library and data about its WorldCat holdings.

The national libraries Web pages utilize only part of the functionality developed in the Office of Research's WorldMap project, however. OCLC's researchers developed their prototype for comparing a variety of library information on a global level.  Their project is interesting not just for the particular application that the researchers built, but because their effort represents an innovative way of repurposing and blending metadata from a variety of sources in a visual representation. Lynn Connaway and Larry Olszewski presented some of the WorldMap prototype research findings at the 2006 Charleston Conference.  

Beyond the national libraries and regional groups using CBS systems, OCLC has been reaching out to many other libraries and consortia around the world, resulting in the prospect of loading more than 250 million records from major non-U.S. institutions into WorldCat in the coming year or two.  Taken together, all of this activity has gradually changed, and will continue to change the composition of WorldCat.  For example, records describing library materials written in languages other than English now make up a little more than half of WorldCat's 120 million records.