Alice Sneary: February 2009 Archives

I recently stumbled over a delightful site: the One Minute Critic, brought to you by the Fort Vancouver Regional Library District. The vlog is a great example of librarians having fun highlighting their collections, using WorldCat lists to help people in their community connect to their library and providing sheer entertainment value in ways both high-tech and low-tech.

The 10 Classic Cookbooks list caught my eye, and then I found myself wanting to watch all the One Minute Critics! Incidentally (and interestingly)--this library system has one of the highest referrer rankings of WorldCat.org. In other words, lots of users find their materials through WorldCat.org, and they send a lot of traffic to WorldCat.org. It's a virtuous circle--WorldCat connecting people with libraries and great library materials (like cookbooks!).

The excitement continues to build around the movie Slumdog Millionaire, nominated for 10 academy awards this year. I went to see it over the holidays and loved it. This morning there was a related story on NPR about it that caught my ear.

So if the economic downturn has limited your trips to the movie megaplex, your library can still deliver the goods:

• 138 libraries have the audiobook


• 205 libraries have the soundtrack


• 752 have at least one of the 18 book editions and formats available.

I'm sure as the video is made available, the DVD will appear here, too. Potentially little known fact: the book was originally published under the title Q & A.

Lucky for you, an entrepreneurial WorldCat user, Joseph Hafner, was thoughtful enough to gather all relevant materials into a single Slumdog Millionaire list.

Watch the movie trailer from YouTube:

We're two weeks into the WorldCat Mobile pilot and you've already uncovered a lot of future functionality and would-be-nice-to-have features--in addition to helping identify specific troubles with certain models of phones. Thanks to the 1,315 people who have already downloaded the app to their mobile phone, there were 39,474 queries made to WorldCat.org through the app. in January.

Extrapolating from the usage statistics, most people seem to be starting their searches at the "home" screen (1,209 users made 26,450 queries). But then 452 people started at the "change location" section (452 users made 4,218 queries)--which just goes to show that lots of people are either reading my hints or more likely, you're using the app on the go, for travel. Finally, the down economy may be prompting people to find more libraries, more often, because the 263 people who used it created 5,355 queries.

All in all, it's a fantastic start for the WorldCat Mobile pilot, and if you haven't tried it yet, go on and give it a go. If you have tried it and received an error message, brace yourself and would you be willing to try again? Our partner organization with the pilot has been making fixes and putting in patches almost 'round the clock. If you try it again and still have problems, please send us feedback so we can get it fixed.