This quick but uber-helpful walkthrough comes to us from the LibraryTechTalk blog, a team blog from the Albert S. Cook Library at Towson University. David, one of the Emerging Technologies Librarians on staff, put together a few simple steps that outline how to create a WorldCat list and then how to get that list onto your WorldCat list widget.

So go check it out and get busy making your lists and widgetizing them!

The top five items that WorldCat Libraries added in January 2010 are:

1. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association which was added by 2252 institutions.
2. Eidi, has reading level of elementary and junior high school. Eidi was added by 1927 institutions.
3. How to Build Your own Country, is appropriate for primary (elementary) school readers. It's been added by 1899 institutions.
4. Million-Dollar Throw also for elementary and junior high school readers. 1827 institutions added Million-Dollar Throw.
5. Touchdown: The Power and Precision of Football's Perfect Play also appropriate for elementary and junior high school readers. It has been added by 1790 institutions.

All of the above, except the number one spot, were Junior Library Guild selections.

The most recently added items lists appear on the WorldCat Library's profile page, such as our metro library here in Columbus. You can find your own local library's profile by searching WorldCat Libraries, if they are a WorldCat library, you can see their recent items. This month 716 libraries show up with new items giving us a total of 14,014 institutions that added new materials within WorldCat.

When you visit your library's recent items list, you can subscribe to the list with RSS and get updates each month in your RSS reader.

We were tickled pink on Monday evening to see the New York Times FirstLook blog was featuring a mashup made from the NYT Best Sellers API and WorldCat.org links. Built by Wade Guidry of the Collins Memorial Library at the University of Puget Sound, the mashup uses Yahoo Pipes, to let Puget Sound library users find New York Times Best sellers for hardcover nonfiction, paperback nonfiction, and hardcover fiction via RSS feeds. It makes a lot of sense, if you're looking to see what the rest of the U.S. thinks is worth reading--from titles available at your library.

A nice touch in their catalog, too, is the library map display. So when you find an item you're interested in, it shows you the handy schematic of where you find it in the library building. I know all too well the woes of wandering all over, looking at call numbers on shelves in an unfamiliar library location.

While we won't be able to include that level of granularity on WorldCat.org for a long time (!) Wade's mashup shows how putting two things together, with a little developer elbow grease, can really create a super useful tool that more than doubles the value. (Of course, since he's a WorldCat Mashathon alumni, would we expect anything less?)