WorldCat blog updates take new form
Hi everyone. You may have noticed that our blogging velocity and perhaps vociferousness has waned in the past few months. But not our veracity, certainly....
WorldCat.org is growing by leaps and bounds in terms of people who use it to find relevant, timely information in libraries worldwide. Usage is up, referrals (other Web sites who link in to WorldCat.org) are up, lists, profiles, reviews, ratings, tags, searches saved--all of these metrics continue to increase month over month, year over year. WorldCat.org is also still growing in a huge way in terms of the content that is available. More than 1.5 billion items are now findable in libraries from a single search box. 111 million+ of those items are articles from the following sources:
* OAIster
* JSTOR Archive
* Elsevier metadata
* Medline
* ERIC
* British Library Inside Serials
* ArticleFIrst
And the WorldCat.org traffic partners like EasyBib, BibMe, RedLaser, Pic2Shop and many many others that have embedded WorldCat.org data into their apps and sites make it even easier for you as a user to find items in libraries, no matter where you start your search.
We've enjoyed giving all the latest updates over the past 3 years in this format--the WorldCat blog--but we've realized the conversation has largely moved to other locations like Facebook and Twitter. So we're still committed to bringing you all the news that's fit to know about WorldCat.org from a library user point of view...but as of August 21, we will do it in one fewer place. The content of the blog will stay here and stay searchable, but we will no longer post to it or accept comments on posts.
If you haven't liked WorldCat.org on Facebook or followed us on Twitter yet, go do it now so you won't experience any disruption in discussion. In fact, you'll probably be refreshed to see all the discussion going on there. If you're a librarian, make sure you add the OCLC Cooperative Blog into your RSS feedreader, because we'll post the behind-the-scenes of-interest-only-to-librarians stuff there now, too.
See you over on these other places. And thanks for continuing to be such loyal readers and users of WorldCat.org, and of libraries.
On July 18, 2011 at 3:55 PM Rebeca said:
This is a bit sad. I subscribed to your feed on Google Reader in order to keep updated with any changes or news you had. I'm aware that facebook and twitter also have feeds, but those don't always work well. Maybe you could consider using posterous or something similar so then your posts would still be shared in facebook and twitter, but with better RSS support and an option to discuss things on your own blog.
On July 18, 2011 at 4:04 PM Alice Sneary
said:
Thanks Rebeca. We, too, think it's a little bittersweet but feel confident everyone will still hear what's up with WorldCat.org--especially if you also subscribe to WorldCat email updates. Thanks for the tip--we'll look into posterous, too.
On July 20, 2011 at 10:03 AM Lisa said:
Yay, JSTOR! Also, love those three fabulous Latin-rooted v-words in the first paragraph. Great words :)