Find It in a Nearby Library

George, Alane and I have agreed to share our soapbox today with Andy Boyer, one of the creative minds behind the Open WorldCat program.

A bit of context about Open WorldCat
As you may have heard, OCLC and Yahoo! are working together to raise the visibility of libraries with a co-branded Web browser toolbar. The news release from one of our most faithful blog readers, Bob Murphy, explains the project.

Andy's guest posting

Want a quick way to find library resources online?

We [OCLC] have teamed up with the Yahoo! Toolbar folks to make it easier for you to access two million of the most popular records found in WorldCat, a central catalog of library holdings. The Yahoo!/OCLC toolbar is a project associated with Open WorldCat, a new OCLC initiative designed to increase the online visibility of libraries and their collections.

The toolbar lets you restrict your search to just the WorldCat database and locate libraries in your area that house materials you'd expect to find in libraries: books, movies, and historical archives.

To find WorldCat records, enter a search term in the toolbar's search box, and click
either the WorldCat logo or select "Libraries" from the drop-down menu next to
the "Search Web" button.

See the visual here.

The WorldCat bibliographic database was built by thousands of librarians over several decades, and maintained by OCLC. It has 57 million catalog records for items in nearly 1 billion locations.

We're busy making the rest of the WorldCat database available to crawl and if you're
interested in watching it grow (every 12 seconds, a new record is added to
WorldCat), check out: http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/grow.htm.

Also, if you're attending the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey this week, stop by the Yahoo! Search-sponsored Internet Café where the Yahoo!/OCLC toolbar will be on every computer.

--Andy Boyer
Open WorldCat Product Manager