How to use this Page

Released this weekend, the WorldCat keyword widget is pretty darn cool. You'll have to scroll down, though, to see it on our antiquated page layout (if you still read on the big screen, rather than your aggregator). Perhaps (sigh) it is time for some actual design skills to help us out here at IAG. I am feeling the need for some visual freshening. Or perhaps it's just spring fever.

Our original intent in keeping It's All Good in its current polkadotted fashion was to encourage everyone in libraries or library school who, like us, had limited design skills, attention spans and hours in the workday to devote to blogging to consider its merits and see how easy it was. "See," we said, "See how we're using it in the totally out-of-the-box, you don't need special tools way." But by now that ship has sailed...

But back to the WorldCat Keyword search widget. Designed especially for content pages or blogs that are relatively narrow in scope, you can build a refined keyword search right into the widget...and then of course you can also change it and get results right in the cute box. Play around with it and see what you think. Better yet, put it on a couple of blogs/pages and see what your users think.

I've been working on a sort of "StoryCorps" project for WorldCat and library cooperation--except it's video. It's really simple. All you do is record a quick blip about Why You Love WorldCat.org, and upload it to YouTube to join the growing collection.

We're inviting everyone to record their "WorldCat stories" in video form. It can be a simple as telling the world why you love a specific WorldCat.org feature (10 seconds), or as involved as relating the time when someone you knew absolutely couldn't find the Ukrainian resource she desperately needed, until a library staff member suggested WorldCat and she found the actual digitized art object itself. (2 minutes or, as long as you like).

If you're headed to the ACRL conference, we even have a videographer lined up to do the video taping for you. It will be at the OCLC hospitality suite at the Seattle Sheraton, room 3102 from 1-4 pm.

If you're at SXSW Interactive, lucky you! Record yourself in the midst of all the fun.

Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, has been published by Perigee, so go check it out in your local bookstore. In the post below Ammon discovers the wonder of librarians.

Last week I wrote about some of the frustrations I have with libraries and the burgeoning practice of moving items to offsite storage, and I am afraid that what I wrote may have unintentionally come across as a condemnation of librarians and/or library science. After speaking with some librarians about the subject it seems rather clear that they regard offsite storage, at best, as a necessary evil. And although my evidence is purely anecdotal, I also had an impression that there is some disagreement between library staffers and library administrators as to answer the question of what should be moved offsite when there simply isn’t enough room at the library.

The question of what to send offsite is not one that has an easy answer. I asked at several libraries what the policy was for deciding which items stay and which go offsite and found that there wasn’t a great deal of consistency among them; different facilities base their decisions on different criteria. One thing was fairly consistent, and that was that every one said that the frequency with which an item was used played a large part in the decision.

On the face of it this would seem to be a logical thing – it is far more practical to keep a book that is used frequently than to keep a book that is used once every decade or two. And some libraries, particularly those of academic institutions, have a responsibility to their users to keep more germane materials at hand. But do all libraries have to be practical?

Aside of the fact that by moving obscure items offsite and rendering them unbrowsable you are condemning them to a further self-perpetuating cycle of obscurity, I have another problem with this practice – if all our libraries focus on primarily keeping books that are used frequently there is a risk of homogenization. It may well be impractical, but I am of the opinion that the potential of serendipitous discovery of some delightful and strange old book should play as large a part in deciding what to keep as frequency of usage.

I have a feeling that I am crankier about this than the average person, most likely because I’ve spent the past few months looking for books and periodicals in libraries which have all been sent offsite. And so I’ve spent far more time this year talking with librarians than I have in previous years. This has led to a startling discovery, which is that I know very little about both libraries and librarians.

I’ve long thought of myself as pretty library-savvy, and certainly not the kind of person who needs to spend a good deal of time pestering the librarians with questions. I can remember the flush of satisfaction I felt when I first came across worldcat.org, and thought that I could now effortlessly find any book in any library in the world. It turns out that I was in a fairly advanced state of ignorance, one in which I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.

For instance, worldcat does not have a complete list of all the books in all libraries. It is a magnificent resource, I use it all the time, and it has attained the status of being one of those few things in my life that I feel are indispensable. But it is not complete. My understanding is that libraries have to pay a fee to have all their holdings listed in worldcat, and some smaller or underfunded libraries are either unable or unwilling to do this. Does this mean that their holdings cannot be found? Not at all – they can be found in another catalogue, called the OCLC, but you need a librarian for that.

I receive a great deal of joy from discovering my ignorance, provided that it is concurrent with discovering someone who has the means of enlightening me. And so recently I’ve had a wonderful time finding out how much I don’t know about libraries, courtesy of a number of reference desk librarians. I’m simultaneously delighted to have been made aware of how knowledgeable and helpful these people are and terribly dispirited that I’ve already spent so much time in libraries without availing myself of their help.

Perhaps most of you who read this already know all about the esoteric abilities of the reference librarians, in which case you can scoff at boors like me, whose typical scope of questions ranges from “where are the restrooms?” to “how late are you open?”. But I’m willing to bet that most library patrons are not-so-blissfully unaware of how limited their library experience has been. In the past few months I’ve been given passes to private libraries to which I don’t belong, had books found that I thought no longer existed, had things looked up for me hundreds of miles away, gotten tutorials in how to research far more efficiently, and received answers to dozens of questions that I didn’t even know I had yet.

It reminds me of when I finally realized that the dictionary is so much more than just a book of definitions – reference desk librarians are the etymologists, the orthoepists, and the collectors of citations of the library.

So I had a fun-filled Saturday today. It was a WorldCat-filled day, seems like.
I started out at the WorldCat Local meeting at 9 this morning. Went to the booth, collected literature. Trucked to the Hyatt for the WorldCat.org meeting. Very good questions and interest, with all the new features coming out.

One thing it seems like we (OCLC) should be more vocal about is the point of WorldCat.org. It's primarily a way to connect end-users on the Web with local libraries and library materials. All too often we get caught up in feature/function and loose the big flick of why we're doing this in the first place: library visibility.

It is so fun to see familiar faces and meet new friends. There was talk yesterday at the Symposium of a future contact lens that could be embedded with metadata...so in theory as someone is walking up to you, their name and how you know them could flash up at you. That would be REALLY helpful at conferences!

But I digress. I did make time for lunch with colleagues at the Corner Bakery, a popular spot with tasty salads and sandwiches. Then back to the convention center for the WorldCat Local meeting. Panic because no catering. Whoops, we didn't order any catering.

It was really heartening during the WorldCat.org session to hear OCLC's view of the usability test outcomes from graduate students, undergraduates and public libraries...and then to hear the same comments echoed from librarians at the WorldCat Local session this afternoon. There were speakers from the University of Washington, University of Delaware, University of California and...(?) memory escapes me. But all very very interesting stuff.

The gentleman from UW who spoke about their installation of WorldCat Local was saying you have to trust your users and prepare for success--their ILL fulfillment traffic went up by 300% or some ridiculously large number. In terms of "trust your users"--he had staff not believing that people needed all this information! (They didn't need it before...) And I think the idea was, they weren't finding it before, so they didn't know it existed.

The theme of the day seems to have been, "People expect a Google-like experience, and we want to figure out by hook or by crook to make it happen." This is a great shift from what I have heard at previous conferences. There is no hand-wringing or drama about if Google is going to take over the world. Now it seems most people are simply taking it as fact and trying to figure out what to do about it. And luckily, WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local seems to be mentioned as part of the solution, anyway.

So then while the meeting is still going on, I have to hop out to meet with a publisher rep about advertising. Print advertising still attracts eyeballs, but there's not a lot of innovation going on there. Online and event advertising seemed to be a hotter topic, based on the conversation we had. What advertising do you notice most? Notice least?

Then it was back to the hotel to prepare with other groups of people for sessions tomorrow. And I left my scarf in the hotel lobby bar. Shoot. Then a quick hop up to the OCLC Green Suite for the next-to final meeting of the day. A large-group discussion, with food and snacks.

Tomorrow is the OCLC Update Breakfast. There have been so many news releases this week--it will be a wonder if we can cover them all in an hour.

See you at the Blog Salon tomorrow night! 5:30 to 8 pm, Hyatt Regency Centennial I, F/G.

The Guardian has a long article about what the mechanisms are that keep local library catalogs form being effectively spidered and Googleable. They dip into the complicated area that is policies around record-sharing and talk about OCLCs changed policy concerning WorldCat data. This policy, if you’ve been keeping close track, was slated to be effective in February and, thanks in no small part to the groundswell of opposition, is currently being delayed until at least third quarter 2009.

Hey everyone. I've been "head-down" the past few weeks, as we've come to say in our group. I've learned how to host Webinars--or at least I can say that I've wrestled with WebEx with the best of them.

Anyway, before I zip off to the very first WorldCat Hackathon in New York tomorrow (I'm so excited!!), I wanted to introduce a guest post from a fellow OCLC staffer, Arthur Smith. Arthur is the Director for Strategic Business Development in the Middle East and India. He keeps us on our toes and always has great insight into things, it seems to me. He sent a photo last week that I immediately wanted to share with you, because it speaks volumes about the incredible work that librarians do on a daily basis all over the world... Read the rest of this post

If you're a coder-type or want to hang out with some and brainstorm some great ideas/write some great code, come to the WorldCat Hackathon!

Registration is now open for the Nov. 7-8 event in New York at the New York Public's Science, Industry and Business Library.

I'm excited because I'm going to be there and "cover" the event, interview/blog about the attendees and (very important) make sure there's enough yummy food.

So you may have noticed we have been suspiciously quiet since ALA. Is it because we used up all our decent ideas at the LITA Forum? Blog salon?
Hardly.

• I think it's because we're all trying to dig out from the "ALA preparation" hole that we (at least, me) invariably find ourselves in.
• Chrystie is busy launching a new WebJunction site.
• I spent a week in Ohio and now have a new official role as the consumer marketing guru for WorldCat.org. (My words, not OCLC's).
• George is valiantly trying to have a summer in between speaking engagements and entertaining IFLA fellows.
• Eric, well, Eric last I know was organizing a baseball outing. But that was in his spare time.

Dear OCLC,

I’m sure you do this for some very important reason, but spending $16 to express mail me a copy of a report that I didn’t ask for (though it does look quite interesting) seems wasteful. I go to the post office once a week and all express mail does is makes my postmistress agitated. While WorldCat is closer to being useful for me — showing one copy of Jane Eyre shown that is actually in my state before the ones one state over; the closest copy actually being about a quarter mile from here — I’d love it if you could apply this money to some sort of teeny-library scholarship fund so that we could benefit from WorldCat in Vermont instead of just hearing about how we can raise more money to pay you with.

Thanks.
Jessamyn

I’ve been watching WorldCat grow, but I’m a little confused. When I fist looked, the “title” I saw was Americana, cinema and dramatic arts, cookbooks, erotica, fine, decorative and graphic arts, illustrated books, literary first editions, metaphysics and the occult, science fiction, juvenalia, investment rarities. Now it just says List #2. These are not book titles. What am I watching?

Karen Calhoun

metadata management bw (before the web) and aw (after htet web)
bw
- or finding library materials
- catalog records (well-understood)
- shared cooperative cataloging systems

aw
- for finding all kinds of things
- many types of records and sources
- loosely-coupled metadata management
- multiple batch creation and extract

metadata is now really cool stuff

recommends O’Reilly’s article “What is Web 2.0?” and David Weinberger’s book Everything Is Miscellaneous
“the third order of order” - make the biggest pile you can
“include and postpone” - can be organized over time, some of them will be grassroots (like LibraryThing), some will be official (taxonomies, etc.)
- need them both, but have to pay attention to the less formal ones

people are using metadata to interact and contribute, even though they may not know what it is

what would metadata 2.0 be like?
- not your father’s metadata
- remixing, reuse, mashups
- wth the necessary rights
- metadata syndication
- enabling a rich user experience
- global, group, and local metadata management
- long term vision
- things you can do right now at your library

Amazon relentlessly enhanced metadata and redefined it for the world of books

what is a “full record?”
showed the same record from Libraries Australia, WorldCat, and Amazon to show the differences between a “full record” for each
from a user perspective, which one is the “full record?” amazon
- the horse has left the barn

using metadata from multiple sources
all of this remixing has generated a high interest in copyright
Creative Commons licensing has proven to provide an alternative to full control - it’s a bridge between a world that controls every use (”all rights reserved”) and anarchy where content providers are exposed to exploitation
CC lets you protect your work while also allowing your content to be remixed

“intellectual property management” is one of the burning issues of Web 2.0

be where their eyes are; syndicate your metadata outwards
OCLC calls this getting libraries to “web scale” - getting collections to show up in as many places as possible through this kind of syndication

showed WorldCat Facebook widget
- showed how you can share a WC list with people in FB
makes library collections more visible and connects everyday users the ability to share books in new and exciting ways

overwhelmingly, users start with an internet search engine, not library resources
this doesn’t mean people are no longer using libraries or library resources, but it does mean they no longer begin with the library website
so we have to take our collections where the users are

catalog used to be our sun in the galaxy, but now it’s just a planet in the user’s galaxy
the story of the catalog is not over

one library working by itself is not going to make this happen, is not going to get to “web scale”
can’t command a huge amount of attention for just one library
she believes that to keep libraries strong and vibrant in their communities, we need to work together to command a much larger presence on the web for library collections

talked about Open WorldCat Partner Program
showed an example of driving traffic from the web to a library-owned title
chose a German title (since the internet and books aren’t just for English readers)

we can be connected: a new vision for metadata management
data can flow local <--> group <--> global

worldcat.org statistics
- number of libraries visible through WC and partner sites = more than 10,000
(ed. - see my Flickrstream for the rest of this slide)

everywhere, the library
anchors for neighborhoods and communities, just as they always have been
welcoming space in the community + great visibility of the collection on the web so that no matter where you start, you can end up at your library

long-term vision
no less than a new age in which an individual library catalog is one node on the web that is attached to many other nodes and the user can traverse those nodes easily and conveniently to their library’s collections
can retain your independence but be loosely connected in Web 2.0-fashion, the same way so many other things are today

what can you do right now?
- take libraries to a wider audience, eg surface your collections in as many places as you can on the web
- encourage a Web 2.0 “culture of participation” in your own communities; support digital citizenship
- partner with museums, historical societies, cultural organizations, eg to add new online content

pushing our data out, pulling users in: libraries and course management systems

in 2004, 40% of classes used course management systems; more now
good: embed a library presence in course sites
better: customize RSS feeds to course sites, links to course readings

American University has done some great work integrating conent into LMS courses using customized RSS feeds

public libraries in Canada created http://mycommunityinfo.ca/
working with the community to index locally-relevant sites
has a “life events” section (retirement, what to do if you lose your pet, going off to college, etc.)

public libraries in the UK created The People’s Network
was funded by the lottery
partnering with individuals and community groups to create content

question: if we spoonfeed the content into the LMS, does that give students less incentive to learn how to do it themselves
answer: if 2% are starting with the library website, 98% of them aren’t seeing this stuff anyway; doing this can drive users back to using your resources and services

question: what should catalogers be doing differently in terms of their work
answer: they should be embracing many sources of data, reuse it, get it done as quickly and as easily as you can; make sure your catalog is current - never have a backlog; revamp your skills and this kind of metadata management; learn how to interact with your user community; learn how to handle special collections

question: is there a way for me at my public library to find out how many links are coming back to my catalog from WorldCat?
answer: yes!

At long last, I am very happy to welcome the WorldCat blog into the family. Many of you met Jasmine at the last Blog Salon, and if you haven't yet--you might have seen her on the road talking about social networking and WorldCat.

She just made her inaugural post to the WorldCat blog (full disclosure--I am on the WorldCat blog team, too.) with a classic Sesame Street YouTube video of Cookie Monster in the library. I love it!
(And after you watch it, you'll no longer marvel at why the library brand=books!)

Slow reading points me to the Not in WorldCat blog, showcasing weird funky and obscure books that you can’t find in one of the many libraries Worldcat covers.

Worldcat.org is the public face of the largest combined (or “union”) library catalog in the world. Library folks usually refer to it as OCLC (Online Computer Library Center). Currently OCLC/WorldCat catalogs over 1 billion items from over 60,000 libraries around the world. This blog is not affiliated with OCLC/Worldcat in any way. It’s just an outlet for one bookseller/librarian (me) to feature unusual, rare and interesting items that exist outside of WorldCat’s vast reach.

I went to my first Hanukkah party yesterday. We played Texas Hold 'Em Driedel and went home reeking of fried food smell. It was great!

'Tis also the season for Science Fair projects at public libraries around the U.S.
(And you thought it was the holiday shopping season!)

We had an interesting discussion today about a trial program we've been running on Yahoo and MSN, to show paid search results for meaningful content in Worldcat. Science Fair projects and related content has been the clear victor, in the results. Likely any Public Library Reference librarian who's driven the desk a year or two could tell you that, but it was good to see the online world bore out the same results.

Recipes were also a big hit--little wonder with the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday in November and baking season in full swing.

Dust off that online cookbook display and consider digitizing a few always-out cookbooks--people are looking for them online!

3. "Resume samples"
4. "Property Tax"
5. "Tax Forms"

rounded out the top 5 visit results. We limited this test to U.S. audiences only, if I remember correctly. Shows you what at least some of America is thinking about:
How can I do my holiday shopping and deduct it from my taxes?

If you have been published, you can find out how many of about 10,000 libraries around the world have it by going to

WorldCat.org now has list-making functionality! I have been excited to see this feature go in--and now it is available. I did a quick list search for "book" and it looks like 47 lists have already been created since Friday. And judging from the titles and descriptions, people are finding lots of creative ways to use lists. Awesome! I feel like it's like my own personal cataloging ability, powered by WorldCat. I will resist the urge (for now) to go through my entire bookshelf.

A few additional creative uses I'd thought about:

• I could see bookclubs or reading groups using the list functionality to keep track of what they've already read, and to solicit potential new titles from the members.
• For the academicians among us, you could load up the required readings from a syllabus into a WorldCat list--students could see at a glance which editions/articles were available at the library, what was checked out already, available as an eBook, etc.
• Maybe a family could track their library-movie-watching together, through a WorldCat list. Or a teen could post out the coolest sounds s/he has heard from the library's eclectic music collection...

Tim has a post on the Thingology blog about OCLCs new announcement that they are creating something they call WorldCat Local, further blurring the boundaries between book data and end users services using that data.

There are a lot of good things about this. And—lest my revised logo be misunderstood—there are no bad people here. On the contrary, OCLC is full of wonderful people—people who’ve dedicated their lives to some of the highest ideals we can aspire. But the institution is dependent on a model that, with all the possibilities for sharing available today, must work against these ideals.

Keeping their data hidden, restricted and off the “live” web has hurt libraries more than we can ever know. Fifteen years ago, libraries were where you found out about books. One would have expected that to continue on the web–that searching for a book would turn up libraries alongside bookstores, authors and publishers.

It hasn’t worked out that way. Libraries are all-but-invisible on the web. Search for the “Da Vinci Code” and you won’t get the Library of Congress–the greatest collection of books and book data ever assembled–not even if you click through a hundred pages. You do get WorldCat, but only if you go sixteen pages in!

Meanwhile WorldCat still tells me that I have to drive 21 miles — to a library I don’t even have borrowing privileges at (Dartmouth) — to get a copy of the Da Vinci Code when I know that I can get a copy less than half a mile down the street, and another copy eight miles away, and another copy if I go another two miles, and then another copy eight miles beyond that. I can get maybe eleven copies of the Da Vinco Code before I hit a WorldCat library.

There may be a future world where teeny libraries like the ones in my area and other rural areas become part of this great giant catalog that is supposedly so beneficial to library users everywhere, but for now they can’t afford it. And every press release that says that this sort of thing helps everyone is like another tiny paper cut added to the big chasm that is the digital divide out here. How is this problem getting solved? Who is trying to solve it?

Tim has a post on the Thingology blog about OCLCs new announcement that they are creating something they call WorldCat Local, further blurring the boundaries between book data and end users services using that data.

There are a lot of good things about this. And—lest my revised logo be misunderstood—there are no bad people here. On the contrary, OCLC is full of wonderful people—people who’ve dedicated their lives to some of the highest ideals we can aspire. But the institution is dependent on a model that, with all the possibilities for sharing available today, must work against these ideals.

Keeping their data hidden, restricted and off the “live” web has hurt libraries more than we can ever know. Fifteen years ago, libraries were where you found out about books. One would have expected that to continue on the web–that searching for a book would turn up libraries alongside bookstores, authors and publishers.

It hasn’t worked out that way. Libraries are all-but-invisible on the web. Search for the “Da Vinci Code” and you won’t get the Library of Congress–the greatest collection of books and book data ever assembled–not even if you click through a hundred pages. You do get WorldCat, but only if you go sixteen pages in!

Meanwhile WorldCat still tells me that I have to drive 21 miles — to a library I don’t even have borrowing privileges at (Dartmouth) — to get a copy of the Da Vinci Code when I know that I can get a copy less than half a mile down the street, and another copy eight miles away, and another copy if I go another two miles, and then another copy eight miles beyond that. I can get maybe eleven copies of the Da Vinco Code before I hit a WorldCat library.

There may be a future world where teeny libraries like the ones in my area and other rural areas become part of this great giant catalog that is supposedly so beneficial to library users everywhere, but for now they can’t afford it. And every press release that says that this sort of thing helps everyone is like another tiny paper cut added to the big chasm that is the digital divide out here. How is this problem getting solved? Who is trying to solve it?

Keep in mind that while it is in the best interests of librarians to access to bibliographic records be as open as possible — to facilitate record-sharing, search and retrieval of items in a library and just our collective knowledgebase generally — it is often NOT in the interests of library companies, or libraries who act like companies, to share their data such that other people or libraries can use it to do what they want with it. So goes the saga of NYPL vs ibiblio, a long and not at all complicated tale concerning their records and what is or is not copyrightable about them. Special appearance by OCLC and their revised policies about records sharing.

Exciting news! In addition to a cool downloadable search box (in customizable colors) that you can add to your blog or Web page (see ours at left, if you click through from your RSS reader), and browser toolbars, NOW you can also add a WorldCat gadget to your personalized Google page.

Happily, I have done it here:







Of course, if you're a Resource Shelf reader, you're thinking smugly to yourself, Ah Ha! Done! Downloaded! Awesome.
What other neat gadgets should I ask the WorldCat team to think about building for us?

Amanda, from Notes from the Digital Frontier, does a nice bit on why she thinks libraries will continue. Keep in mind she is in no way connected to a library, that I can tell. (Other than being a user.)

Another good tidbit from inside and outside the library world: a colleague at OCLC in charge of social marketing for WorldCat.org pointed me over to Ning.com. And would you look at that, Bill Drew has set up a Library 2.0 social network with 14,275 views so far in four (4) days ...Ning looks to be a very easy way to set up a social network that has friending, photos, blog posting capabilities and so much more. It may not be absolutely beautiful, but it's an easy way to get started and not re-invent the wheel.

I also wonder if Gather.com would be a good social networking place for library or WorldCat-ophiles...so I started a WorldCat group. Go Join!

“Till then I walk the side streets home,
Even when I’m on my own.”
“Side Streets” – Saint Etienne (Web site ; Wikipedia entry) from the album Tales from Turnpike House (Wikipedia entry)

Turnpike House is a real building in the London area, and the songs on Saint Etienne’s concept album, Tales from Turnpike House, weave flashes of several fictional character’s lives set in flats in the building. Reviews (sample reviews: 1, 2, 3) offer more backstory than I’ll offer here, but let’s just say the reviewers and I concur: Tales is the exception to the rule – this concept album actually works.

And speaking of concepts that work: OCLC Research has been working on a project called WorldCat Identities. Chief Scientist Thom Hickey – my boss – has been the lead on a project to build the infrastructure to automatically generate one HTML page per identity (i.e. an identity being character, person, animal, or organization, etc. referenced in selected fields in a bibliographic record) in WorldCat – about 19 million unique identities at last count. The pages draw from bibliographic data in WorldCat which is used in conjunction with authority file data to provide information about and list works by the identity, reveal related identities, display publishing patterns, and offer whatever other information of interest we can mine and display. And the works listed link to – you guessed it – WorldCat.org.

Like many projects OCLC Research has undertaken in recent years, WorldCat Identities builds on prior work by OCLC and RLG.. WorldCat identities draws inspiration from RLG’s RedLightGreen and leverages FRBR (work clustering), Audience Level (surmising audience), VIAF (linking common identities in diverse authority files), NameFinder (user-typo-tolerant searching support), Dewey Browser (DDC made visual) and makes use of SRU, a protocol that OCLC has worked with the Library of Congress and others to develop. And, of course, WorldCat – the collective work of thousands of libraries and tens of thousands of librarians – is the key data source.

Thom’s various entries on his blog, Outgoing (see this entry and later posts) and posts by Lorcan and Walt have talked about the project. Tim O'Reilly gave it a nice write up on O’Reilly Radar. And WorldCat Identities has also been mentioned by a number of other blogs (see the end of this post for links to posts I’ve found).

The attention is gratifying and confirms the generally positive reactions and excitement face-to-face demonstrations of iterations of the project have engendered when Thom has presented WorldCat Identities in various settings. We’re also delighted to be working with our RLG Programs colleagues and several RLG partner institutions to get some early, expert feedback on WorldCat Identities.

As a fallen cataloger and recovering reference librarian, I’ve been impressed with WorldCat Identities in many ways. It leverages libraries’ investments in bibliographic and authority data. Each page is just the sort of by-and-about presentation to make undergraduate-doing-a-paper-about-a-person reference transactions go much faster than helping the user assemble some version of the same on their own. And the links to related identities offer a very addicting experience for the curious – the “side streets” are many and often quite interesting. Some nice examples of pages that work well:

• Victor Hugo
• Hayao Miyazaki
• Barbara Streisand
• Peter Pan (Fictitious character)
  

But all is by no means perfect. Searching the names listed above in WorldCat Identities returns search results that show variations in how the names have been recorded in bibliographic records – some differences in form of name no doubt reflect different authoritative forms of name adopted by various communities (and VIAF offers the potential means to link multiple authoritative forms efficiently), but more than a few the variations arise from errors in the underlying data, errors that keep apart things that should be put together or alternatively put together different persons and their works as a single identity.

There are also some not-quite-as-expected-by-the-user ordering and ranking of works associated with some identities (see for example Elvis Presley), but it’s not so obvious how to “fix” many of these unexpected results (the criteria applied make logical sense for most pages) – tinkering with ranking often fixes one case only to break many, many more. And, of course, for those music lovers among us, it’s wonderful to find so many persons involved with music, but at this stage in the project, WorldCat Identities does not yet include corporate headings so no musical groups are given their own pages (and yes, you may spot a few, but they’re not really supposed to be there – these reflect a small but visible corpus of MARC tagging errors). Note that corporate identities will be added at some point – it’s a research project, after all, and we didn’t put in every feature we’d planned on day one.

So I invite you, gentle reader, to try WorldCat Identities out and let us know what you think. And if you find some especially compelling side streets, please leave a comment on this post so we can all retrace your steps.

{Posts relating to WorldCat Identities in various blogs (feel free to add more references via the comments – apologies in advance to those I might have missed): English-language: Baby Boomer Librarian, Catalogablog, DigitalKoans, Family Man Librarian, Household Opera, Library Stuff, Notional Slurry, PersonaNonData, Thinking Out Loud, Tom Keags, Vacuum, Wikimetrics ; French-language: Figoblog, affordance.info ; Italian-language: Fermo 2003 ; Japanese-language: Current Awareness Portal ; Romanian-language: ProLibro. Wikipedia articles incorporating WorldCat Identities links: Bill Clinton, Brad Pitt}

Photo: Doorways in the French Concession area of Shanghai. (c2004 Eric Childress)