As reported by Infotoday's Newsbreak, OCLC has agreed to open up the entire Worldcat database, all 53.3 million records complete with library holdings from OCLC libraries (unless they opt out), to both Google and Yahoo! Soon any web searcher could potentially retrieve books matching their search terms, including the more esoteric ones, and easily locate a local library that owns it! That should increase business at our local libraries! (Sorry for all the exclamation points, but the librarian in me gets excited about this kind of thing.)
As previously reported, OCLC has already made available a subset of their catalog records, about 2 million of them, for inclusion on both Yahoo and Google. That's all very nice, but rather incomplete. Expect to see the new and improved coverage possibly starting as early as November. So the Google-Worldcat bookmarklet is about to become even more useful!
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