Eight Polish academic libraries are subscribing to WorldCat and FirstSearch following a successful pilot. The libraries all contribute to NUKAT (Narodowy Uniwersalny Katalog Centralny), Poland’s national union catalogue which serves around 60 academic and research libraries and 900 librarians. NUKAT records were added to WorldCat last year for the first time.
In 2006, a large proportion of the NUKAT union catalogue of records and holdings was added to WorldCat, building the world’s largest and most comprehensive database of bibliographic and ownership information by a further 350,000 records. NUKAT contributed records on items published in
The contribution of NUKAT’s records and holdings precipitated a pilot of WorldCat First Search for all the NUKAT members. Over 50 per cent of NUKAT members participated and over a quarter of them subsequently made the decision to continue using FirstSearch beyond the pilot phase. FirstSearch is an ideal tool for mediated discovery. Users benefit from additional catalogue information including tables of contents, reviews and excerpts, which allows them to quickly evaluate resource relevance and to easily ascertain where they can gain access to the content.
Agnieszka Kasprzyk, Research Assistant for NUKAT Center of Warsaw University Library, said, “Polish libraries contributing to NUKAT are proudly taking their first steps on the way to cooperation within the WorldCat framework. Polish authors and Polish library collections have gained a world-wide audience and Polish users of WorldCat reach through their local library window out to the whole world.” Agnieszka and her colleagues will present a paper on NUKAT cooperation with OCLC and Google at a conference for Polish librarians in July.
Dr Henryk Hollender, Director, Lublin University of Technology Library, adds, “WorldCat is a novelty in Poland, and the solution adopted seems pretty inventive and elegant. Next to all the imaginable general applications (including showing our professors the books they authored in the libraries all over the world, listed scrupulously one by one), it opens a wide field for analysis and comparisons for cataloguing managers, collection building specialists and higher education administrators. For us librarians it is an example of best cataloguing practice. With WorldCat accessible at a click, librarians can easily include electronic resources, media or special collections items in their files. And the files can no longer do without the access points and advanced search techniques that WorldCat offers.”
Eric van Lubeek, Director of Sales & Operations for OCLC PICA, says, “WorldCat holds over 67 million bibliographic records from libraries across the world and we are delighted to be able to include the NUKAT information for
