OCLC Open WorldCat Project

Yahoo! Search Joins OCLC Open WorldCat Project
by Barbara Quint , Information Today
Information Today, July 6, 2004
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb040706-2.shtml
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OCLC (http://www.oclc.org) has expanded its online library locator service for books to Yahoo! Search. Last October, I reported on a new pilot project between OCLC and Google that opened library holdings information for just under 2 million items in the WorldCat union catalog (extracted from the 55 million items with over 900 million holdings recorded; see http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb031027-2.shtml). In January 2004, Yahoo! approached OCLC to arrange access to Open WorldCat records under Yahoo!’s new Content Acquisition Program. (For a description of that program, see http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb040308-1.shtml.) While Google took months to spider all the OCLC data, Yahoo! moved very quickly. The agreement was signed May 21; content first appeared on Yahoo! Search May 28; and full crawling and loading of the 1,993,073 set was completed June 6. Overall, OCLC seems to consider the Open WorldCat project a wonderful success and plans to expand it.