WorldCat Collection Analysis

I attended Glenda Lammers informational session on this new product, slated to come out in March. WorldCat Collection Analysis is a very sensible way to get even more value out of our collective industry investment in WorldCat. Duh, we should use it as a tool for comparitive analysis betwixt and between libraries.

The service relies on up-to-date holdings in WorldCat, and then you select your peer group to compare against. The interface look and feel is very similar to FirstSearch. So similar, in fact, that I think it is a tab on your FirstSearch authorization. No new password required. That's a small but appreciated nod to OCLC's attempt to simplify what on my desk is a growing wad of sticky notes...

So from the tenor of the room today, what everyone is quite eager about is to be able to do an in-depth collection analysis with only a 72 hour turn-around time for the data. (Instead of 3 weeks and hours of paperpushing, I take it?) Of course, seeing some sample results screens got us all very curious to think about who we'd set our library up to compare against. Who are some of your peer library collections?

Another cool thing is that once you do the comparisons and identify titles you'd like to acquire, you can link straight out to Alibris, Abe Books, etc and buy the books! Talk about efficiency. This is cool.

The service is available for individual libraries or library groups, and the pricing is based on your number of holdings. Even for the biggest category--more than 1 million holdings--a year's subscription was only $8500 plus a one-time $500 set up fee.