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Principal Librarian for Reference Services Santa Monica Public Library
OCLC's Open WorldCat Pilot [http://www.oclc.org/world cat/pilot/] "is an initiative that integrates library records into popular Internet search sites and tests the effectiveness of the Web in guiding users to library-owned materials. The goal of the pilot: to make libraries more visible to Web users and more accessible from the sites where many people begin to look for information."1
The project aims to "open" WorldCat records to present and potential library users through the familiar Web search engines Google andYahoo! Search. EnablingWeb users to locate materials they need quickly and easily in libraries near them will promote library use and reinforce the value of libraries. Ultimately even people who don't often use libraries may come to consider libraries as a first source of information. If you believe in libraries, as OCLC obviously does, what's not to love about Open WorldCat?
For the Open WorldCat Pilot, OCLC extracted a 2-million-record subset from the 55 million records in the WorldCat database. OCLC selected the items most frequently cataloged by libraries; specifically, they selected records with one hundred or more libraries listed as holding the item.2 It is important to note that the pilot uses "limited fields" of the records. Gary Price asked in ResourceShelf, "Why doesn't OCLC make subject headings viewable and hyperlinked?"3 Perhaps that is a problem the search engines could help solve. Limiting the fields included could also make it difficult to distinguish between formats like VHS and DVD.
According to the Open WorldCat Pilot Quick Facts, "WorldCat records began to display within Google search results in December 2003 and within Yahoo! search results in May 2004. Inbound links from Open WorldCat search results have grown from 39,000 in February 2004 to more than 1 million in the first half of June 2004."4
Approximately 12,000 libraries are participating in the project, including the academic, public, and school libraries originally included automatically, plus state, federal, and special libraries that have asked to join. Libraries may choose to opt out of the program by notifying their OCLC regional service provider or by completing an online form on the FAQ page. Libraries not part of the pilot but that contribute records or holdings information to WorldCat may complete an...