From the News Release:

OCLC today announced four new agreements have been signed with European national libraries and affiliated institutions which significantly increase the coverage of records in WorldCat and the visibility of libraries in WorldCat.org within the Europe and Middle East regions. These latest agreements in Denmark, Switzerland, Slovenia and Israel show that libraries from around the globe are responding very positively to the opportunity that WorldCat offers to streamline workflows and increase visibility in WorldCat.org, a global destination web site for libraries, which surfaces to a worldwide community the collections they hold and the services they deliver.

You can read the details of the news below.

In Denmark, OCLC and DanskBibliotekCenter (DBC) have agreed to load the Danish National Union Catalogue (DanBib) with holdings into WorldCat. DBC is responsible for providing the Danish national digital infrastructure as well as managing its national union catalogue. The agreement is the result of a year-long pilot coordinated with the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media (DALM), the governmental administrative and advisory body responsible for public and research libraries. The pilot took place with the participation of academic and public libraries from across Denmark and will add approximately 10 million Danish records in WorldCat. In addition, a connection between WorldCat.org and bibliotek.dk will be orchestrated. Bibliotek.dk is a national service managed by DBC to enable Danish citizens to request and receive items from any library in Denmark, free-of-charge via the web.

Jens Thorhauge, director general, Danish Agency for Libraries and Media said of the agreement, “We feel that our valuable national service, bibliotek.dk – will benefit from increased site visits and requests as Danish users of WorldCat.org are directed to the service.”

In Switzerland, OCLC and the Informationsverbund Deutschschweiz (IDS) have signed an agreement to load the records from the five IDS consortia to WorldCat. IDS, which also includes the National Libraries of Luxembourg and Liechtenstein in their number, will be loading approximately 10 million bibliographic records and 16 million holdings records. IDS want to get a higher visibility for the libraries of Switzerland through WorldCat.org as well as gaining access to the 130 million records in WorldCat for cataloguing purposes.

In Slovenia, OCLC have finalised an agreement to load 3 million records later this year with IZUM, an organisation which represents the interests of over 380 academic, public and other libraries. The activities of IZUM are mainly engaged in the development and operation of the COBISS system and services (Co-operative Online Bibliographic System and Services), which represents the core of the library information system along with shared cataloguing and many other library automation applications in Slovenia. IZUM also provides users in Slovenia with free access to different foreign databases and services, including OCLC FirstSearch.

Tomaž Seljak, director of IZUM: “In Slovenia, we are interested in bibliographic data on published works of Slovenian authors being available in WorldCat, and also through WorldCat.org, COBISS.SI will become even more visible to Internet users.”

And finally in Israel, Malmad a consortium of over 30 academic institutions has just secured as part of their OCLC cataloguing subscription a complete retrospective batch load of holdings data into WorldCat, which will ensure that all holdings will be visible through OCLC Connexion, OCLC FirstSearch and WorldCat Resource Sharing.

Dr. Sigal Scher, director of the MALMAD Consortium, said “The academic libraries in Israel are looking forward to making their holdings more visible and accessible through membership in OCLC and WorldCat”.

The timing of this announcement comes as the 75th IFLA General Conference and Assembly, which OCLC sponsors, takes place in Milan. Rein van Charldorp, OCLC Managing Director, Europe, Middle East and Africa said of the agreements, “At OCLC we are uniquely placed to help libraries operate at a network-level, and realise even greater efficiencies and visibility on the web. The scale and richness of WorldCat and WorldCat services is proving to be an increasingly attractive proposition for libraries in this region.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 and is filed under Cataloging and Metadata, Information Industry, Libraries and Librarianship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.