Results tagged “search” from WorldCat Blog

Libraries subscribe to databases of content, like you and I might subscribe to a newspaper or a magazine. Like us, libraries buy these subscriptions based their interests or the interests of their communities.

A medical library at a university might pay for access to highly specialized content about surgical techniques, but that access is limited to their students, staff and professors. A public library might subscribe to a database that provides environmental or business regulation data for their entrepreneurial and business communities. This content is hidden deep within subscription-based Web sites that require authorization. The content is seldom exposed in Web searches, but your library can make some of this hidden content available to you.

Libraries that have set up access to their subscription databases on WorldCat.org, enable their users to search these hidden, licensed databases as well as the print, audio and video collections in the library all at one time. If your library is doing this, you have access to a lot of deep Web content. But the rest of us do not.

And that is the topic of a panel discussion that OCLC has proposed for the 2010 South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. We've submitted a proposal for a panel on "Discovery, Identity and Rights: Three Deep Web Problems." But we need YOUR "thumbs-up" in order to increase the odds of our proposal being selected.

The selection process closes on Friday, Sept. 4 so please take a moment to visit the SXSW PanelPicker and give us a thumbs up: http://bit.ly/vuPu5. You'll be asked to register, but it's a very simple process.

Help us and a panel of licensing, business and identity experts answer the question: "What if you could search all of the content available to you?"

Here's a roundup of the latest enhancements to WorldCat.org. You may have already noticed a few of them, as you've been using the site lately.

New keyword search widget

The latest WorldCat widget is now ready for your download: Keyword Search. Weighing in at 300 pixels wide, this beauty is perfect for subject-specific Web pages and blogs. You customize it with specific search terms initially, so that relevant materials available through WorldCat.org are automatically displayed to your site visitors. You can play around with it, here.

Save your WorldCat searches

If you find yourself repeatedly crafting searches around something specific like a hobby or large-print editions, this new feature will be a real time saver. Just do a search and refine your query as usual. Once you have the results set you want, click the "Save this Search" box in the upper right of the results screen. Now you can see at a glance if new materials are available in a WorldCat library.

Cover art now on brief results
Hooray, check it out!

Profile enhancements: popularity tracking

You may not think your activities in WorldCat are interesting to anyone else, but now you can know how popular your profile is through a new ticker. Having a robust profile helps people know more about you when they look at one of your lists or reviews.

Get ready for big changes to the site design, look and feel in April. After extensive usability testing, WorldCat.org is getting an extensive update to make it easier and more intuitive to use.

Google recently released a book viewability API that provides links to books in Google Book Search using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers. Basically (without going into a bunch of code stuff that I don’t really understand), this API allows other organizations to link to books that Google has scanned (and will scan) based on data that is pushed/pulled automatically back and forth between the requesting site and Google.

[BTW... You now know the ugly truth: I am not a programmer; see “code stuff” and “pushed/pulled” above]

The upshot of all this, though, is that sites like WorldCat.org can provide a link back to Google Books. Sometimes that will mean the full text of the book, sometimes not. For example, Cory Doctorow’s great novel, “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,” is available in full. So the WorldCat.org page for that book shows a link under “Get it” to “View Item Online (Google Books).” This takes you to the Google Books page for that work and the full text.

It’s not just a one-way street, though. If you find a book in Google Book Search, you can often follow a link for it back to local libraries through WorldCat.org. So, suppose you locate the Google Book page for "The Future of Freedom" by Fareed Zakaria. You'll find that the entry for this work is a limited preview. But you'll also find a link under the "Buy this Book" choices to "Find this book in a library," which (you guessed it), takes you back to the WorldCat.org page for it.

Fun stuff.

Most people don’t get too excited about search result pages. We type in some terms; we get some results back. We expect the results to be helpful, and we expect all this to happen in a few seconds. We don't ask for much more than that.

At OCLC we take search a little more seriously than most folks. But even so, I was really surprised when I started experimenting with the new digital image collections that have been integrated into WorldCat.org. Just adding 'cntnt' to a search term will limit your search to the new collections.

A fellow Tribe fan sent me a link to a search on "Cleveland Indians" which pulled up about 60 digital images mostly from the Cleveland Memory Project. I love this shot of Satchel Paige in his Cleveland uniform.

That was cool. But a quick cut-and-paste, and I had a handful of images of diners, and then a great result set for "automobiles".

But my favorite searches so far have been on "political cartoons" which unearthed around 30 great cartoons from the 1960's and earlier, and a search I did for my mom, who collects postcards, which brought up several thousand wonderful old postcards.

So try some searches using the limiter 'cntnt' and see what you find. And share your discoveries with the rest of us by posting the links in the comments below or on your own blog.

I ran across this interesting post yesterday on how adding the right kind of additional data to a dataset did more to improve its searchability and relevance than creating a more complex algorithm to search it. Worth a read for those search-geeks out there like myself.

We have daily conversations here about how to improve the relevance of WorldCat's search and find ourselves tweaking the algorithm almost monthly, but it's amazing how much more relevant the results became (back in the early days of '06) just by adding the count of libraries that hold an item into the "data pool." This gets me excited to start folding user-contributed data (tags, reviews, what-have-you) into the mix as it makes sense and as critical mass builds. The benefits to discoverability could be tremendous.