Sunday, August 06, 2006

WorldCat.org Is Live!

The new public version of WorldCat is live. Give it a test drive!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps I'm unclear on how this is sipposed to work, but it doesn't seem quite ready for prime time. I've entered a few books that I know our loca libraries carry, only to be told that "Sorry, no libraries with the specified item were found."

I tried for our city (Rochester,) then Minneapolis, then the whole state. Same message. Yet when I went into either "OCLC First Search" or "Search the catalog at your library" I could find the item.

What concerns me is that the average patron is not going to double-check with either OCLC or their local catalog, and will take the initial error message at its word....

Anonymous said...

Aaaack. There is no ability to edit your posts once posted!

I apologize for the various misspellings. Too little coffee too early on a Monday....

Anonymous said...

Mary Beth, can you give us an example of a search that didn't work? I just tried a couple of title searches and they worked just fine.

George said...

Mary Beth, the materials you are looking for have to be in WorldCat to be found, and your library has to have a FirstSearch subscription for your items to show up in the public version of WorldCat. Does this help answer your questions?

Bruit et chuchotements said...

Hello. I noticed that worldcat gives access to the french academic collections (Système universitaire de documentation)but apparently not to the french national library collections (BNF). Where could I find a list of the 10.000 libraries involved ? What are the technical conditions of participation (Marc, Z3950...)?

George said...

The best place for information on French participation in this project would be to the OCLC Pica office located in Paris:

OCLC PICA France
14, Place des Victoires
92600 Asnières sur Seine
France
t +33 1 55 02 14 80
f +33 1 47 93 50 13
e paris@oclcpica.org

More info at:
http://oclcpica.org/?id=1068&ln=fr

Daniel said...

I've already posted the search box to my blog and offered a brief, but positive review.

I'm concerned that requiring registration, especially including an organization name AND a licensing agreement will slow down the adoption of the Open WorldCat search box, especially on non-library sites. Having said that, I think the license terms are reasonable. It's just that the click-wrap agreement is burdensome to the average blogger/reader.

Also, I have a personal web site, and a MySpace profile. Do I need to register both of these before adding the WorldCat search box? Who would I ask if you don't know?

All in all, a good product and thanks for making it live.