worldcat at ut by ronda rowe, university of texas at austin

WorldCat @UTImplementing WorldCat Local

Ronda RoweCharleston Conference

November 3, 2010

WorldCat Local from OCLC• A localized version of the OCLC database

• Main index has almost 1 billion records

• Although many fewer unique records

• Tremendous installed customer base

WorldCat Local from OCLC• Article level data (not historically part of

OCLC)

• Some loaded in WCL index

• Some brought in through federated search

• Probably represents the largest challenge

The OCLC database is quite a legacy• WCL has inherited many things from OCLC

• Different cataloging standards

• FRBR

• RDA

• Problems between local and OCLC holdings

• Issues with loading/tagging vendor records

What does OCLC uniquely offer?• Long history of cooperative catalog

• Organization greater than any single library

• Stature to stand with Google

• Ability to reduce redundancy of work

• Ability to pool our knowledge for discovery

• Central service for technical support

Implementation timeline

• First presentation to staff – February 2007

• Implementation begins – May 2007

• First pass all paper based

• Link added to website – June 2009

• Soft-roll out without much fanfare

• Not the default search

Only implemented Discovery piece

• Still have local ILS (Millennium)

• The “back room” is still in the same place

• Still have other resources in place on our site

• Local federated search

• Didn’t add links aside from main search

Response from users somewhat underwhelming

• Usage statistics very low

• In last year, only 14,498 unique visitors

• Compared to over a million searches on our site

• ILL statistics show increase but not tremendous

• Odd statistics to prove success of discovery

• Shouldn’t successful discovery mean more local use?

Statistics might reflect inherent problems

• Traditional content (OPAC) primary focus

• Means that users are primarily discovering MARC records

• Is this what discovery should be?

• Inherent tension between tradition and future

• Google Scholar is cool because it was different

• Search across all content without so many limits

WCL is a mashup of past and future• OPACs usually good for known-item

searching

• If you know what you want, there’s probably an index

• Google is good for “unknown items”

• Type something in and all sorts of things are found

• WCL doesn’t do either thing all that well right now

Is WorldCat Local web scale discovery?

• Web scale means 2 things (Google Scholar)

• Everything in one index (no federated search)

• No authentication for search

• By this standard, not web scale

Demo of WorldCat@UT

http://utexas.worldcat.org

QUESTIONS??

Ronda Rowe

ronda@austin.utexas.edu