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Public version of WorldCat is live

Aug 7th, 2006 Print this

OCLC’s public version of WorldCat went live yesterday, 6 August 2006. It is the world’s largest computerised library catalogue with more than 70 million records and one billion location listings.

It’s something that founder, Frederick G Kilgour, just missed seeing. He died on 1 August aged 92. See OCLC’s blog, It’s All Good, for a tribute to this inspiring man.

Give it a burl. There has been debate about whether public users will understand what it all means and will now expect to be able to trot into any library with holdings on WorldCat and borrow.

WorldCat home page

I don’t think this has been an issue with the public interface of Libraries Australia, launched on 30 November last year.

Libraries Australia home page

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2 Responses to “Public version of WorldCat is live”

  1. on 08 Aug 2006 at 9:27 am1Alane, OCLC

    Thanks very much for the note…Fred Kilgour was an iconoclast, and I think he would have approved of opening the WorldCat database to the world.

  2. on 08 Aug 2006 at 10:11 am2Kathryn Greenhill

    I’m even more impressed with OCLC now. You guys are really monitoring what your users are saying about you. Wow!

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