We did a study within our consortium CLIC which has over 2 million records to see which items did not have OCLC numbers (most because of licensing limitations when we purchased records from resource vendors) and discovered that 250,000 items would not have been included if we used WorldCat Local as our consortial discovery layer. That meant that 10% of our resources wouldn't be discovered. I would think that large research libraries would have a larger percentage.
Linda
Linda Hulbert, Associate Director
Collection Management and Services
O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library #5004
University of Saint Thomas
2115 Summit Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55105
Phone: (651) 962-5016 Fax: (651) 962-5486 email: lahulbert_at_stthomas.edu
The journal article you find is the journal article you were looking for
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Poulter, Dale
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 6:34 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] OCLC annoucement
We have also recently added OCLC numbers to many of our records. One major issue is that, in many cases, records obtained from other sources cannot be sent to OCLC due to license restrictions. Assuming we are not the only library with these restrictions, it would be interesting to know what percentage of library holdings are actually reflected in OCLC. My belief is that it is high but far from 100%.
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Charley Pennell
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 5:39 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] OCLC annoucement
Hi Marc-
A lot of libraries, including my own, have been queuing for OCLC's "reclamation service" by which we atone for all those years of using usurper services such as LC's Z39.50 port, or DRA's, or book vendor services, and send an extract of the entirety of our MARC data to the utility for matching against WorldCat. In return, OCLC sends you back lists of your local control number and the corresponding OCLC#. We just used API to add the latter to 035 (OCoLC), which retrospectively gave us missing OCLC numbers along with updated numbers to cover superseded ones. At the end of the process, we had only about 1% of titles w/o the ubiquitous numbers, a high proportion of which were reserve materials that should never have been sent but had the wrong item type/location attached. So, getting the OCLC numbers is not so problematic, and if your ILS enables APIs, adding them to the catalog is not problematic either. I know that you are also Unicorn people, so you should be good to g!
o.
We used the reclamation service to enable us to roll up display based on a common unique ID with our TRLN partners in TRLN Endeca
(http://search.trln.org) and soon for our UNC-wide union catalog. Of course there is no guarantee that we are all using the same OCLC record, as WorldCat has many hundreds of thousands of cases where multiple records describe the same manifestation. Still, the OCLC number is about as close as we're going to get to a unique URI for the objects described in most of our catalogs. He who has the best available metadata (not the best possible, mind you) wins, whether we like it or not. I might have hoped that LC could have become a true national library to fulfill the "best metadata" role as they did in the print union catalog era, but alas the "not for profit", but essentially private, sector has won out. Now we will see what ransom must be paid.
I hope that this isn't the death knell for the "blooming of a thousand flowers" we've seen on the search side over the last few years.
Charley Pennell
Principal Cataloger for Metadata
NCSU Libraries
Truitt, Marc wrote:
> FWIW, we've been considering WCL membership / subscription /
> whatever-you-call-it with OCLC and we have a consortial database of
> several million records, very few of which include OCLC numbers. OCLC
> is offering what it terms a "remediation" service, wherein it takes a
> dump of our bib records and runs a matching algorithm against it,
> returning to us the OCLC record numbers matched. We've been given to
> understand that we should expect the overwhelming majority of our
> records to be matched correctly.- mt
Received on Fri Apr 24 2009 - 09:18:11 EDT