Frequently Asked Questions about the WorldCat Registry

The WorldCat Registry is a Web-based directory of libraries and library consortia. This authoritative service allows any institution to do three things:

1. Create and maintain a comprehensive institutional profile in a single, secure, Web-accessible location
2. Share this profile internally between branches or consortia members, and externally with vendors and other third parties, electronically automating the exchange of information common to these relationships
3. Enhance the visibility of institutional services and content, moving them closer to consumer point of need through Web services such as WorldCat.org

The Registry streamlines a necessary but time-consuming workflow. Many institutions have to routinely provide many kinds of information about their physical operations, computer systems and people to a variety of organizations—vendors, publishers, partners, funding agencies, fellow institutions, and the OCLC cooperative.

Here, you create and manage an institutional profile on a secure Web platform where these parties can quickly access the most up-to-date information. You avoid having to maintain multiple profiles by various means (Web interfaces, paper forms, faxes and phone calls), and can automate routine tasks such as activation of a new subscription service or renewal of an existing one. This greatly reduces the administrative burden associated with such services and the chance that they will "go dark" when internal system parameters such as IP addresses change.

Institutions that register a profile also realize another key benefit: Their online services get greater visibility in places they normally wouldn't. Over time and through a variety of standardized Web services, the WorldCat Registry will syndicate essential data—such as your Web catalog's base URL or your OpenURL resolver—across more and more Web sites and Web-enabled applications. More people will discover, link to and use your content.

Vendors and service partners can use Registry data on an ongoing basis to save the costs involved in building and maintaining their own registry infrastructure, and to ensure the currency of their client information and thus the consistency and quality of their services to end users.

An institution's Registry profile features data about its physical facilities, operations, services, and people, including:

• Identifying codes assigned by various standards or industry organizations;
• Details about its location, contacts, Web sites, and electronic services;
• A record of relationships with parent consortia or child branches;
• An administrative overview of staff and service statistics.

No! The Registry is open to all libraries and consortia.

Participation in the WorldCat Registry is free for any library or consortium. There is no charge to create a profile, nor to share it with vendors and other entities that may use it.

The easiest way to limit the visibility of your institution in the WorldCat Registry is to set the Privacy Preference of your profile to "Private." From any page within your profile, select the Name and Location screen using the navigation links at left. Check the status of your Privacy Preference. If it is set to "Public," click the Edit This Page button, then change the setting to "Make information private." Click the Save Changes button at screen bottom.

Once your Privacy Preference is set to "Private," only your institution's name and street address will be publicly searchable or viewable in the Registry. You can still choose to maintain a complete profile, and share it internally with staff or externally with vendors and other third parties.

Existing user accounts you may have with the following OCLC services are accepted by WorldCat Registry:

WorldCat Registry has multiple levels of access; an authorized account has the highest level of access. The chart below illustrates permitted activities within these levels and explains how to authorize your account:

No. OCLC has automatically created Registry profiles for its member institutions and pre-populated those profiles with existing data. OCLC has also auto-generated profiles for many non-OCLC institutions using data freely available from other sources.

Before you use the Registry's "Add an Institution" option, we suggest you first search the Registry for an auto-generated profile for your institution.

Only people with access to Registry user accounts you have authorized to edit your institution's profile will be able to view the complete profile. (Authorized users for an institution are maintained via the "Authorize Users" link on the Profile Summary page.) Unauthorized users can only view select information within your profile, which does not include sensitive data such as IP addresses.

The easiest way to see what Registry information is available to unauthorized users is to view the profile of an institution that is not your own.

Only people with access to Registry user accounts you have authorized to edit your institution's profile will be able to change existing information within your profile. (Authorized users for an institution are maintained via the "Authorize Users" link on the Profile Summary page.)

It is possible that someone not directly employed by your institution could create a Registry user account and add information to your profile. These unauthorized users, however, can only contribute information to data fields that are blank at the time they access the profile. All information contributed by an unauthorized user in this manner is considered suspect and withheld from inclusion in the profile until it is verified by OCLC personnel.

Yes, an institution can permit multiple users to modify its profile. (Authorized users for an institution are maintained via the "Authorize Users" link on the Profile Summary page.)

Once you have created a profile, the WorldCat Registry interface provides a special Web hyperlink you can send to vendors, consortia, funding bodies, internal staff—any person or organization you believe could benefit from having access to your information. The link is "obfuscated": it displays random characters hiding encoded information, similar to the authenticating links in subscription e-mail newsletters. Anyone you send this link has instant access to a special read-only version of your Registry profile, letting them proactively acquire the most up-to-date information about your institution without calling you or requesting action on your part.

Upon the initial release of WorldCat Registry, individual libraries may choose when or if to provide a link to their Registry profiles to the organizations from which they purchase services. While this approach will work for small service organizations, bigger vendors with many institutional customers may not find this solution scalable. OCLC will soon be offering data services that provide these organizations programmatic access to large numbers of institutional profiles in the Registry.

Sign in and click "My Account" at the top of any WorldCat Registry page, then click "Change Your E-mail Address, Password and E-mail Subscription." In the "Personal Information" section, check the box labeled "Send me updates about WorldCat Registry and WorldCat.org" and click the "Save Changes" button. Occasional e-mail announcements will tell you about these sites' latest features and new Registry-related services.

If you don't have an account or maintain a profile in the Registry but will still like to subscribe, click the "Get E-mail Updates" link at the top of this or other Registry pages.

That is largely up to the community that utilizes the WorldCat Registry. OCLC has pre-populated the Registry with entries for libraries, archives, museums and other forms of institutions. Traditionally, of course, institutions consist of physical facilities with physical and/or electronic collections and/or services that cross multiple departments or branches, administered by one or more professionals. However, no restrictions prevent a smaller physical entity such as a church library, or a "virtual" entity such as a digital library, from representing itself in the Registry. Note, though, that a postal address is required.

Yes, if you are an OCLC member library whose holdings are visible through WorldCat.org and "Open WorldCat" results linked from Google and Yahoo!. Certain data in your Registry profile relative to physical location and electronic services will drive information and links displayed in open-Web WorldCat results. (Data of this type already known to OCLC has been moved into Registry profiles automatically created for OCLC member libraries.)

Registry data for non-OCLC institutions (as well as OCLC members that either do not contribute to WorldCat or do not meet the requirements for broad Web exposure of their holdings) will be visible on WorldCat.org at a later date.

Yes. You can place a link to your institution's full profile on your library's intranet site. This will provide your staff a common location for referencing current technical and service information for your institution. You can also save your institution's complete profile as an XML file, which can be locally managed and shared in whatever way you choose.

An XML-format file is easily imported into Microsoft Excel 2003. Save your profile onto your computer from a Web browser window, then use the Open command in Excel and locate the file. Excel automatically parses the XML data into spreadsheet columns.

Yes. IP address information stored in your Registry profile is, for the moment, provided only for the informational purposes of parties with whom you share your profile. OCLC will be applying your entries in the IP address portion of your Registry profile to OCLC applications at a later date.

OCLC intends to translate the Registry into other languages. Future interface translations will be announced as they are released.

Yes. Your OpenURL resolver(s) provide an important link between discovery interfaces and the delivery of full text, abstracts and other electronic content to which your institution is subscribed.

Registering the IP address or range of your resolver helps improve end users' linking experience from WorldCat.org and other WorldCat partner sites, which get library services in front of more people on the open Web. It allows the vendors, consortial partners and other third parties with whom you share your WorldCat Registry profile to quickly reference this information. And an academic library can also point student and faculty users to its Registry profile to obtain resolver addresses when the users are not working on the campus network.