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WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly
libraries A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...
), in many countries, that are current or past members of the
OCLC OCLC, Inc. See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the ...
global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the OCLC member libraries collectively maintain WorldCat's
database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...
, the world's largest
bibliographic database A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works like academic journal, journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government an ...
. The database includes other information sources in addition to member library collections. OCLC makes WorldCat itself available free to libraries, but the catalog is the foundation for other subscription OCLC services (such as
resource sharing In computing, a shared resource, or network share, is a computer resource made available from one host to other hosts on a computer network. It is a device or piece of information on a computer that can be remotely accessed from another compu ...
and collection management). WorldCat is used by librarians for cataloging and research and by the general public. , WorldCat contained over 540 million bibliographic records in 483 languages, representing over 3 billion physical and digital library assets, and the WorldCat persons dataset ( mined from WorldCat) included over 100 million people.


History

OCLC OCLC, Inc. See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the ...
was founded in 1967 under the leadership of Fred Kilgour. That same year, OCLC began to develop the union catalog technology that would later evolve into WorldCat; the first catalog records were added in 1971. In 2003, OCLC began the "Open WorldCat" pilot program, making abbreviated records from a subset of WorldCat available to partner web sites and booksellers, to increase the accessibility of its subscribing member libraries' collections. In October 2005, the OCLC technical staff began a
wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...
project, WikiD, allowing readers to add commentary and structured-field information associated with any WorldCat record. WikiD was later phased out, although WorldCat later incorporated
user-generated content User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), emerged from the rise of web services which allow a system's User (computing), users to create Content (media), content, such as images, videos, audio, text, testi ...
in other ways. In 2006, it became possible for anyone to search WorldCat directly at its open website WorldCat.org, not only through the subscription FirstSearch interface where it had been available on the web to subscribing libraries for more than a decade before. Options for more sophisticated searches of WorldCat have remained available through the FirstSearch interface. In 2007, WorldCat Identities began providing pages for 20 million "identities", which are
metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...
about names—predominantly authors and persons who are the subjects of published titles. In 2017, OCLC's WorldCat Search
API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...
was integrated into the cite tool of Wikipedia's VisualEditor, allowing Wikipedia editors to cite sources from WorldCat easily. Beginning in 2017, OCLC and the
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
have collaborated to make the Internet Archive's records of digitized books available in WorldCat. In May 2022, OCLC announced WorldCat Entities, a new infrastructure for library linked data. Maintenance of WorldCat Identities was suspended and the service will be discontinued as it is being replaced by WorldCat Entities. In August 2022, OCLC launched a "redesigned and reimagined" WorldCat.org website with the stated goal "to offer greater accessibility to the collections". The website now requires the use of
JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...
and is therefore no longer accessible for users of older web browsers or those that have JavaScript disabled for security reasons. The update also removed users' book reviews and replaced them with reviews from
Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...
subsidiary
GoodReads Goodreads is an American social cataloging website and a subsidiary of Amazon that allows individuals to search its database of books, annotations, quotes, and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and readi ...
. In 2023, Anna's Archive scraped and began distributing the whole WorldCat database and was subsequently sued by OCLC in January 2024.


System architecture

Local catalogs of many OCLC member libraries are intermittently synchronized with the WorldCat database. WorldCat allows participating institutions to add direct links from WorldCat to their own local catalog entries for particular items, which enables the user to click through to the local catalog to quickly determine an item's real-time status (for example, whether or not it is checked out). In a small percentage of libraries, the local catalog is also run by OCLC using an
integrated library system An integrated library system (ILS), also known as a library management system (LMS), is an enterprise resource planning system for a library, used to track items owned, orders made, bills paid, and patrons who have borrowed. An ILS is usually ...
called WorldCat Discovery and WorldShare Management Services. Library contributions to WorldCat are made via the Connexion computer program, which was introduced in 2001; its predecessor, OCLC Passport, was phased out in May 2005.
Cataloging In library and information science, cataloging (American English, US) or cataloguing (British English, UK) is the process of creating metadata representing information resources, such as books, sound recordings, moving images, etc. Cataloging ...
librarians may also use the WorldShare Record Manager or WorldCat Metadata API for similar purposes.


See also

* Copac * Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) *
List of academic databases and search engines This page contains a representative list of major databases and search engines useful in an academic setting for finding and accessing articles in academic journals, institutional repository, institutional repositories, archives, or other collecti ...
*
Open Library Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Hargrave Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet ...


References


Further reading

* * * * * * * See also: Information about licensing of WorldCat records and some other OCLC data.


External links

* * Information on the OCLC website about WorldCat. * * {{Authority control Bibliographic databases and indexes Cooperatives Library catalogues OCLC