WorldCat is newly focused on the universe of data beyond a global catalogue of content – the WorldCat Registry gathers and distributes information about institutional identities and services.
Your library is defined by much more than its collection. Increasingly as important as metadata about the things you own (catalogued in WorldCat's core bibliographic database) is metadata about the institution itself: its identity, electronic services, relationships, staff contacts and other pertinent data that informs the processes and systems driving your entire enterprise.
Management of this information, however, can often be random and unstructured: institutions that purchase technology and content services from many different providers soon discover they're maintaining multiple organizational identities. Each time a piece of data changes – such as a phone number, contact name or Internet IP address – staff must take the time to notify each vendor separately, and often by various means: Web interfaces, paper forms, faxes and phone calls.
An authoritative single source for institutional metadata
As the world's largest directory of knowledge-based institutions, the WorldCat Registry provides a comprehensive, extensible and secure Web platform for managing and disseminating this data. In the same way that WorldCat services use the cumulative power of aggregate information to enhance workflows such as cataloguing and resource sharing, WorldCat Registry makes the administration of institutional data more efficient by moving it onto a networked Web application.
With WorldCat Registry, you can:
- Build a free profile that centralizes information sharing with technology vendors, electronic content or service providers, fellow consortium institutions, funding agencies and other bodies – you don't maintain multiple identities, and their data is always up-to-date
- Share the profile via a special encoded link that gives instant, read-only access to your most current data. Upcoming RSS capabilities will allow people and organizations monitoring your profile to be alerted to changes via RSS-enabled Web sites, Web browsers and newsreaders
- Get greater Internet visibility for your collection and services (coming soon). Your profile data is syndicated across many popular Web sites where information seekers start to search, such as WorldCat.org, through partner programs and a variety of freely distributed Web services
- Automate vendor interactions such as the activation or renewal of a subscription information service, reducing the chance that such services will "go dark" when internal system parameters such as IP addresses change
WorldCat Registry helps your institution eliminate redundancy of effort, allows your service providers to ensure continuity and quality of service, and lets more people broadly searching the Web to discover your resources.
