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WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of 15,600 libraries in 107 countries[3] that participate in the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc.[4] The subscribing member libraries collectively maintain WorldCat's database, the world's largest bibliographic database.[5] The database includes other information sources in addition to member library collections.[6] OCLC makes WorldCat itself available free to libraries, but the catalog is the foundation for other subscription OCLC services (such as resource sharing and collection management). WorldCat is used by librarians for cataloging and research and by the general public.
History
OCLC was founded in 1967 under the leadership of Fred Kilgour.[7] 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.[7][8]
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.[9][10]
In October 2005, the OCLC technical staff began a wiki project, WikiD, allowing readers to add commentary and structured-field information associated with any WorldCat record.[11] WikiD was later phased out, although WorldCat later incorporated user-generated content in other ways.[12][13]
In 2006, it became possible for anyone to search WorldCat directly at its open website,[14] not only through the subscription FirstSearch interface where it had been available on the web to subscribing libraries for more than a decade before.[15] Options for more sophisticated searches of WorldCat have remained available through the FirstSearch interface.[14]
In 2007, WorldCat Identities began providing pages for 20 million "identities", which are metadata about names--predominantly authors and persons who are the subjects of published titles.[16]
In 2017, OCLC's WorldCat Search API was integrated into the cite tool of Wikipedia's VisualEditor, allowing popflock.com resource editors to cite sources from WorldCat easily.[17][18]
Beginning in 2017, OCLC and the Internet Archive have collaborated to make the Internet Archive's records of digitized books available in WorldCat.[19]
As of July 2020, WorldCat contained almost 500 million bibliographic records in 483 languages, representing over 3 billion physical and digital library assets,[4] and the WorldCat persons dataset (mined from WorldCat) included over 100 million people.[20]
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.[21]
^ abMargalit Fox (August 2, 2006). "Frederick G. Kilgour, Innovative Librarian, Dies at 92". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009. Frederick G. Kilgour, a distinguished librarian who nearly 40 years ago transformed a consortium of Ohio libraries into what is now the largest library cooperative in the world, making the catalogs of thousands of libraries around the globe instantly accessible to far-flung patrons, died on Monday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 92.
^Bertot, John Carlo; Berube, Katy; Devereaux, Peter; Dhakal, Kerry; Powers, Stephen; Ray, Jennie (April 2012). "Assessing the usability of WorldCat Local: findings and considerations". The Library Quarterly. 82 (2): 207-221. doi:10.1086/664588. JSTOR10.1086/664588. S2CID61287720. Breeding [2] also makes the following observations about the benefits of the search system: the presence of a more visually appealing interface; the grouping of related material; faceted navigation; and the capability for user-generated content (e.g., reviews). Eden [3] also refers to the advantages of user-generated content possible in WCL...
^Prucha, Francis Paul (1994). "National online library catalogs". Handbook for research in American history: a guide to bibliographies and other reference works (2nd ed.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 25-27. ISBN0803237014. OCLC28018047. Online Computer Library Center has developed two new programs. One is called EPIC, a new command-driven full online service with sophisticated searching features, including subject searches, intended for librarians and other experienced users. The other, designed for end-users, is FirstSearch, which contains the database materials found in EPIC or subsets of them but has a menu interface that nonspecialists find easy to use. Both EPIC and FirstSearch make available the full OCLC Online Union Catalog (called WorldCat in FirstSearch), but they also function as online database services, offering their users a wide array of other databases.
What the OCLC online union catalog means to me: a collection of essays. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC. 1997. ISBN1556532237. OCLC37492023.
Wilson, Kristen (August 2016). "The knowledge base at the center of the universe". Library Technology Reports. 52 (6): 1-35. doi:10.5860/ltr.52n6.
"WorldCat data licensing"(PDF). oclc.org. Retrieved 2018. See also: "Data licenses & attribution". oclc.org. January 14, 2017. Retrieved 2018. Information about licensing of WorldCat records and some other OCLC data.