Quoting Tim Spalding <tim_at_LIBRARYTHING.COM>:
one!
>
> And as for serving data, while OCLC's "Web Scale" services needs a
> redundancy LibraryThing doesn't have, it's worth noting that
> LibraryThing appears to serve more data than they do. And while we
> don't search and store as much data, we're getting up there—40 million
> distinct MARC records, at last count. We do everything off a
> half-dozen commodity Dell boxes.
Tim, I believe that the figures you are working with reflect the
public use of WorldCat. We do not know how much use is made by
libraries/others with OCLC accounts, who are doing cataloging, or
performing ILL transactions. My gut tells me that the vast majority of
WorldCat use is behind that wall.
As a hint, their 2009 annual report states that they batch loaded
something like 241 million records. (Another 30-odd million were
created by online cataloging.) None of that is included in those
public access figures. We also do not know what percentage of OCLC's
expenses go to the maintenance of WorldCat; we know the percentage of
their income that is directly related to cataloging/record loading and
ILL, but not what it costs to keep WorldCat running. (Just put "OCLC
annual report" into your favorite browser for this info.)
kc
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Fri Aug 06 2010 - 13:47:33 EDT