WorldCat Registry: Join up!
OCLC has introduced WorldCat Registry, a one-stop place for libraries, library consortia, library vendors, funders and suchnot to put contact info, link URLs and other "identity" data. Every institution gets its own page—it's like MySpace but with libraries and minus friends, comments, tacky background images and all the drunken photos. Here's LibraryThing's page. We hate being a "vendor," but there was no category for "The OCLC of Lilliput."OCLC is being generous with the entry requirements. Personal libraries* are out, but small institutional ones are not. Their FAQs note "no restrictions prevent a smaller physical entity such as a church library, or a 'virtual' entity such as a digital library, from representing itself in the Registry." So, if you're on an institutional membership, go ahead and take them at their word—join up!
When you join up, you can give your catalog URL as:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/YOURUSERNAME
Your ISBN and ISSN URLs are:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=YOURUSERNAME
&searchbox=ISBNORISSN&searchType=Books
LibraryThing is not currently listed among their vendors. Until they do, select "other."
*Which reminds me, we recently had an application by a coven. They were uncertain if they were a family or an institution. OCLC is silent on the coven issue.
posted by Tim at 6:09 PM
3 Comments:
Ha, done.
This actually relates to a topic that is deserving of an extended discussion, viz., LT and the Global Union Catalog. It's late so I'll just post an extract from one of my first messages to the old LT Google group:
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Despite the power behind MARC databases, one of the great virtues of the LT community is that many of us are actually able to lavish more detailed attention on our personal catalogs than the Library of Congress ever could. The recently-discussed collection of "Night Before Christmas" volumes is a perfect example: only a specialist would be able to devote the time to such a project, and in isolation it might be of interest only to other specialists. But "many small things make a pile" as Google is fond of saying. The power of the "works" system to set a formal foundation underneath the less formal activities of us individual collectors may allow LT to become a global union catalog for innumerable special collections, and so feed them back into the existing "grid" of worldwide cataloging, where Alph the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man...
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In other words, I think certain LT collections ought to be able to genuinely feed back into global union catalogs like OCLC.
It is not just certain collections - some people have done sterling work in attributing cover artists for their books, others (like me) have tried to input all the contents lists for anthologies and collections (unfortunately in comments). Many have tagged prize winners (and nominations). All that is valuable data that is rarely found in the MARC records from libraries - the problem is finding it and using it at the moment.
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