> One of the reasons for this yearly subscription to Worldcat is that is the
> only way to have your holdings visible on worldcat.org.
With due respect, and with fanatical love for Athenaea like yours—I've
belonged to two(1)—why on earth would you care?
They're promoting it? How's that going, exactly? Here's the traffic
comparison between WorldCat.org and Dogster, the social network for
dog-lovers.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/worldcat.org+dogster.com/
Do you visit Dogster? What do you feel about it? If you weren't a
librarian that's how you'd feel about WorldCat. You'd probably feel
nothing at all.
Libraries were once the center of the information universe. Fifteen
years ago, if I had told you about the coming internet, you would have
assumed that libraries would have a prominent place on it. They don't.
Libraries, including WorldCat, rarely show up in web searches, even
for books. I lay the blame squarely at the wrong-headed decision to
keep library data off the "real web" and to push WorldCat as a
"aggregation point" for nobody.
Oh, and LibraryThing, a hobby project for book nerds has twice the
traffic of WorldCat. We'd gladly host your entire bibliographic data
for people to find it. I'd do it for a few bucks, or even free,
because the costs would be trivial. Know why we don't?
Because we're afraid of OCLC.
Tim
1. Boston Athenaeum (lapsed membership) and the Portland Mechanics' Library.
> Lois Reibach
> PT Cataloger
> The Athenaeum of Philadelphia
> 219 South Sixth Street
> Philadelphia, PA 19106
>
> lrreibach_at_gmail.com
>
--
Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding
Received on Tue Mar 09 2010 - 16:34:49 EST