WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of 17,900 libraries in 123 countries and territories that participate in the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. The subscribing member libraries collectively maintain WorldCat's database, the world's largest bibliographic database. OCLC makes WorldCat itself available free to libraries, but the catalog is the foundation for other subscription OCLC services. WorldCat is used by the general public and by librarians for cataloging and research.
History
was founded in 1967 under the leadership of Fred Kilgour. That same year, OCLC began to develop the union catalog technology that would later evolve into WorldCat; the first catalog records were added in 1971. In 2003, OCLC began the "Open WorldCat" pilot program, making abbreviated records from a subset of WorldCat available to partner web sites and booksellers, to increase the accessibility of its subscribing member libraries' collections. In October 2005, the OCLC technical staff began a wiki project, WikiD, allowing readers to add commentary and structured-field information associated with any WorldCat record. WikiD was later phased out, although WorldCat later incorporated user-generated content in other ways. In 2006, it became possible for anyone to search WorldCat directly at its open website, not only through the subscription FirstSearch interface where it had been available on the web to subscribing libraries for more than a decade before. Options for more sophisticated searches of WorldCat have remained available through the FirstSearch interface. In 2007, WorldCat Identities began providing pages for 20 million "identities", which are metadata about names—predominantly authors and persons who are the subjects of published titles. In 2017, OCLC's WorldCat Search API was integrated into the cite tool of Wikipedia's, allowing Wikipedia editors to cite sources from WorldCat easily. Beginning in 2017, OCLC and the Internet Archive have collaborated to make the Internet Archive's records of digitized books available in WorldCat. As of May 2019, WorldCat contained over 450 million bibliographic records in 484 languages, representing over 2.8 billion physical and digital library assets, and the WorldCat persons dataset included over 100 million people.
Model
WorldCat contains records in MAchine Readable Cataloging format contributed by library catalogers worldwide who use OCLC as a cataloging tool, and these MARC format records can also be downloaded into other libraries' local catalog systems. This allows libraries to find and download records for materials they are adding to their local catalog, without having to undergo the lengthy process of creating a new catalog entry from scratch for each new item. WorldCat operates on a batch processing model rather than a real-time model. That is, WorldCat records are synchronized at intermittent intervals with the underlying library catalogs instead of real-time or every day. Consequently:
WorldCat shows that a particular item is owned by a particular library but does not provide that library's call number.
WorldCat does not indicate whether an item is currently borrowed, lost, undergoing restoration or repair, or moved to storage not directly accessible to patrons.
Furthermore, WorldCat does not show whether a library owns multiple copies of a particular title.
As an alternative, WorldCat allows participating institutions to add direct links from WorldCat to their own catalog entries for a particular item, which enables the user to determine its real-time status. However, this still requires users to open multiple Web pages, each pointing to a different online public access catalog with its own distinctive user interface design, until they can locate a catalog entry that shows the item is currently available at a particular library. Library contributions to WorldCat are made via the Connexion computer program, which was introduced in 2001; its predecessor, OCLC Passport, was phased out in May 2005.
