July 2010 Archives

The Google gadget for WorldCat is back! If you have a Google account, add the updated Google gadget for WorldCat to your iGoogle page.

Help users find books at their reading level.

WorldCat has teamed up with MetaMetrics to offer "Find a Book" to help connect readers with books appropriate for their reading level, using the popular Lexile Framework® for Reading. Readers can either enter their Lexile measure or their grade and if they find reading materials difficult or easy. Once they find the books they're interested in, they connect to your library through WorldCat.org and check availability.

 "Find a Book" offers the option to "Find in a library" which connects to WorldCat.org.

Once users are at WorldCat.org, they can create a list, add ratings, get automatic citations for an item or do other social networking-type activities connected to your summer reading program.

Try out the Find a Book site today!

If you're a Twitter user, take a moment to play with a new tool we've developed called Ask4Stuff. Our VP of Innovation, Mike Teets, blogged about this a few days ago. Mike describe this trial service as one of the experiments coming out of the OCLC Innovation Lab.

This trial service allows you to search WorldCat.org by sending a tweet. Just use the hashtag #ask4stuff followed by a few words as your search query and you will receive a tweet back with a PURL or a short URL to the results on WorldCat.org.

Here's an example tweet:
#Ask4Stuff lake erie shipwreck

And the reply:
@[username]We found something on lake erie shipwreck in #Ask4Stuff, get them at http://is.gd/daPWw

To tweet a search query, you just need to post a tweet using #ask4stuff followed by the words you would otherwise enter into the search box: #ask4stuff "search query".

You can limit your search to just titles if you use #ask4stuff ti:search query, such as:
#ask4stuff ti:where the wild things are

Or limit your search to just authors using #ask4stuff au:name query:
#ask4stuff au:daniel pink

For those readers who are patrons of a WorldCat Local library, you can search your local catalog using a hashtag and the URL prefix for your Local at WorldCat.org. For instance, the University of Washington's WorldCat Local URL is: http://uwashington.worldcat.org. To search their catalog, you would use the following tweet format:
#ask4stuff #uwashington [search query]

Your reply would include a short URL that would direct you to the results page at http://uwashington.worldcat.org.

Take a look at this experiment on Twitter and post any comments you have about this service. Even if you're not a Twitter user, you can view the tweets and replies by searching Twitter using the #ask4stuff hashtag.

Is this experiment useful? Practical? Fun? Let us know!