[Sca-librarians] OCLC going open catalog on the web

[Johnna Holloway]

News of the day---
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb041011-2.shtml

All of OCLC’s WorldCat Heading Toward the Open Web
by Barbara Quint
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Excited by the “resounding success” of the Open WorldCat pilot program,
the management of OCLC, the world’s largest library vendor, has decided
to open the entire collection of 53.3 million items connected to 928.6
million library holdings for “harvesting” by Google and Yahoo! Search. A
letter from Jay Jordan, president and CEO of OCLC, went out to members
on Oct. 8. Currently, the Open WorldCat subset database contains about 2
million records, all items held by 100 or more academic, public, or
school libraries—some 12,000 libraries all told. The new upgraded Open
WorldCat program will automatically include all of the 15,000-plus OCLC
libraries that contribute ownership information (holdings) to WorldCat,
unless the library asks to have its holdings excluded. In January 2005,
Open WorldCat will officially graduate from a pilot program to a
permanent “ongoing program”; however, the database will be open for
“harvesting” to Google and Yahoo! Search as early as late November 2004.
During a transition period extending through June 2005, all libraries
with holdings in WorldCat will participate in the Web search engine
referrals. Starting in July 2005, libraries participating in Open
WorldCat must have subscriptions in place to OCLC’s FirstSearch WorldCat
or OCLC will remove their holdings from Open WorldCat reports.

[For background information on the Open WorldCat pilot, see “OCLC
Project Opens WorldCat Records to Google” at
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb031027-2.shtml and “Yahoo! Search
Joins OCLC Open WorldCat Project” at
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb040706-2.shtml.]

Johnnae llyn Lewis