Technology Expo, part 2

"What's Up with WorldCat?" (the first session I attended at the Technology Expo) was presented by Tracy Rochow Byerly of Missouri Library Network Corporation, our state's OCLC service provider that also administers database group purchases and provides training. I've met Tracy before at an SLA function.

WorldCat, for the non-librarians among my readers, is what you get if you imagine your library's on-line catalog put together with nearly every other library's on-line catalog. Libraries pay extra to get access to this huge database of library collections, but check--your library card may be all it takes to get you in.

If you don't have access to that, pay attention to your searches of books, in particular, in Yahoo! and Google or Google Scholar. You may be getting links into the new Open WorldCat. Click on those links and you can get to information about which local libraries have that item.

Here's something that will surely only be of interest to librarians, but it's enthralling! You can Watch WorldCat grow. As items are added to the catalog, you can see the title, author, etc, and which library contributed the record. A lot of them, of course, will be new books, but I get a kick out of seeing things like a Chinese book from 1833 that Harvard just cataloged.     #

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