Blog Post #3: The Open WorldCat Program.

Several months into using LibraryThing, I discovered something called the Open WorldCat program. My entreé into the service was through the device on LibraryThing that allows me to search for images of a book's cover from various sources. One of those sources was dubbed "Find in a Library," which took me to Open WorldCat. OCLC has a description of the service here. Here's an excerpt: "A Web user visits a site such as Yahoo! Search or Google and enters a search phrase that matches the title of a library-owned item. The returned search results include a link to the Open WorldCat "Find in a Library" Web service, where they can enter geographic information that helps them locate the item at a library in their city, region or country." The result is that libraries that are members of OCLC are "more visible" on the Web and their catalogs (as well as their other services) are accessible (as Jenny Levine might put it) from where they live. The description goes on to explain how popular search applications and web browsers are building Open WorldCat into their services. For example, the web browser Firefox has an extension that will add Open WorldCat to its Search bar. What's more, OCLC's description of Open WorldCat says, I can send a link to Find in a Library results for any book using a URL syntax that constructs the link around a standard numeric identifier, like an ISBN number. I have started doing this in my other blog, where I am keeping track of the books I finish reading and creating links to Open WorldCat records for each of them. Finally, the OCLC description links to a webcast created by the Santa Monica Public Library which shows how Open WorldCat can be used to link regional public libraries that aren't part of the same system.