News: December 2009 Archives

Thanks to some quick footwork by a few of OCLC's staff and the guys at Occipital, the company behind the iPhone app RedLaser, WorldCat.org libraries now appear within the mobile apps item search pages.

RedLaser users can scan a book and see the libraries near them that have that book. Then they can click to one of those libraries and get hours, phone numbers and driving directions.

We're putting WorldCat.org data to use and putting libraries right in the mobile user's flow.

Now anyone and everyone can create apps and mash-ups using library data from WorldCat, because the WorldCat Basic API is here!

This new API is a simple interface to WorldCat. It's envisioned to be most useful for lightweight or mobile apps, developed by people outside the library space. Still, anyone is welcome to build noncommercial services with it. [Commercial services are also welcome, but they must go through the WorldCat partnership team to gain access.]

It supports up to 1,000/queries per day in OpenSearch and retrieves results in RSS or Atom. It also provides:

• Information about books, videos, music and more in WorldCat


• Information about authors, titles, ISBNs and OCLC numbers


• Standard bibliographic citation formats in HTML (APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, and Turabian)


• A link back to WorldCat.org for geographically-sorted library information


• An easy way to include library results in comparison-shopping Web sites, mobile or Facebook apps

To gain access to the WorldCat Basic API, select the WorldCat Basic API on the WorldCat Affiliates Tools page. Sign in with your WorldCat Affiliates account and then you'll be taken to a specific site where your individual WS Key will be auto-generated. If you already have a WorldCat Search API WSKey, then you do NOT need a WorldCat Basic API WSKey.

By making the collective library data in WorldCat as accessible as possible to ALL developers, we hope to generate more awareness and traffic to libraries in general. Which is really good for everybody, isn't it?

Happy coding! We'll be excited to see what new and interesting apps and mashups you create!

Two additional databases called PapersFirst and ProceedingsFirst have now also been added to WorldCat.org results. These two indexes contain papers from conferences, symposiums and expositions worldwide. Created from items received by The British Library Document Supply Centre--you'll find 7.4 million published items in English, French, Spanish and Chinese.

If you track specific conferences, or do in-depth research on specific topics, these materials can bring depth and richness to your research. See a sample listing below for representative PapersFirst and ProceedingsFirst items:

• Fighting fire with fire: brain stimulation for the treatment of epilepsy (PapersFirst)
• Strategies towards sustainability of protected cultivation in mild winter climate (ProceedingsFirst)

Happy conference paper reading!