Promotional Tools for the Open WorldCat Program

I got an email from OCLC that I thought might be of interest to our public services folks.

Promotional tools for the Open WorldCat program are now available on the OCLC Web site at http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/open/promote/default.htm. Use these tools to increase awareness of Web access to your library’s resources through Open WorldCat and its “Find in a Library” interface.

The materials available are a printable table tent, HTML e-mail, customizable news release, customizable flier, and a presentation slide.

What are you reading right now?

Post a comment, please, and tell us.

I'm reading Cookwise by Shirley Corriher, ISBN 0688102298.

Open WorldCat Just Keeps On Giving

OCLC is bringing us an interesting expansion of the Open WorldCat program that I've previously discussed on this blog. Here's the official word.

OCLC has begun a pilot program that enables Web users to add content to authoritative WorldCat records they locate through the Open WorldCat program. Available under the Details and Reviews tabs in the Open WorldCat interface, the pilot functionality allows anyone to quickly register and add content such as a table of contents, notes or a review. Open WorldCat users can edit the personal reviews they add to WorldCat records, and may also edit or correct information submitted by others that appears in the tables of contents and notes fields of the records. This pilot will continue into early 2006.

OCLC will first offer this service through the Open WorldCat program and later expand the service to the WorldCat database on the FirstSearch reference service.

Visit http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/open/usercontent/ to learn more about the pilot program.

Initial discussion of this new feature on Web4Lib has been thought-provoking, with such questions being raised as who will own (and can therefore redistribute) the user-contributed data, and can non-member libraries link to the reviews? I haven't had a lot of time to scrutinize the TOS so I don't have any answers to these and other probing questions, but I will say that this sort of social software is very popular and its inclusion in the Open WorldCat program won't hurt library PR in the least.

Here's an example of a newly revamped Open WorldCat record. The new display has several different tabs, Libraries, Details, Editions, and Reviews. I've used Clarkston's zip code as the location qualifier, and the Libraries tab is telling me that the only OCLC-member library near me that holds this title is UGA. The Details tab is pretty self-explanatory, and here you'll notice the ability to add TOCs and notes, one of the newer features. The Editions tab appears to be pulling different editions of the title from the WorldCat database, should you prefer an older edition. This is a very nifty, I think. Finally, in the Review tab you will notice that one user, "Minnie", has already reviewed this title. In the green box at the upper right, you will also notice the Buy It Now link that I've blogged about in the past.

As I said, I haven't had a lot of time to play with this or think about its usefulness for GPC specifically, but I wanted to bring it to your attention and would love to hear your thoughts.

Illiterate Brazilian Man Establishes Community Library

The writer of this article managed to work in the obligatory shushing reference, but the story is inspirational enough to forget all about that. Here's a quote from the gentleman who established the library.

When he asked members of his small bicycling group to help him collect used books, "they all thought I was a little crazy," he said.

But they humored him, and the nameless cycling club got a moniker: "The Madmen of Sao Goncalo." Or so they seemed at first to the neighbors whose doors they knocked on.

"Some people thought, 'You must be joking. Here in this community, people ask for clothes, but to ask for books!' " said Ronaldo Pena, 48, one of the cyclists.

Very incredible story, well worth a read.

LC to Add More Reviews to Bib Records

As of Sept. 1, 2005, the Library of Congress Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT) expanded its "reviews" project to include E-STREAMS: Electronic Reviews of Science & Technology References Covering Engineering, Agriculture, Medicine and Science. E-STREAMS is a free electronic-only book review journal published by Yankee Book Peddler and edited by H. Robert Malinowsky, Professor and Manager of Collections Development, University of Illinois at Chicago.

As with H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, links to which you may have already seen in the catalog, LC will be adding links to E-STREAMS reviews where appropriate and redistributing the records for the benefit of other libraries.

Here's an example of a record enriched with a link to its E-STREAMS review. (You will also notice a link to the title's table of content, another helpful little BEAT project). We use a lot of LC records in our database, so we should start seeing a few of these reviews soon.

Rockdale's New Director

It's all go at Rockdale these days! Send your congratulations out to Laura Tartak who has just become Rockdale's new LRC director.