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WorldCat now contains more than 100 million bibliographic records
 There are now more than 100 million bibliographic records in WorldCat, and for the first time in its 36 year history, the world’s largest database for finding items in libraries contains more records for non-English language materials than for English. On April 1, a record for the 1950s publication from the U.S. Fisheries Laboratory, “Miscellaneous Contributions,” marked the 100 millionth bibliographic record in WorldCat. The record was part of a retrospective conversion project for the University of Washington Libraries.
“We are honored to be recognized for having contributed the 100 millionth bibliographic record to WorldCat, the single most important resource for libraries and library users worldwide—created by libraries and OCLC,” said Betsy Wilson, Dean of University Libraries, University of Washington Libraries, and a member of the OCLC Board of Trustees. “We are particularly proud that this milestone record serves to recognize our outstanding fisheries research collection.”
In the past, WorldCat millionth bibliographic records could be easily recognized by an OCLC record number that ended in zeros. Over the past year, additional types of records have been added to WorldCat, including article-level citations available in WorldCat.org and Institution Records reflecting an institution’s edited version of a bibliographic record. Both of these types of records are assigned OCLC numbers from the same numbering sequence as are master bibliographic records. As a result, OCLC has developed a process that continuously monitors the total number of master bibliographic records in WorldCat. This process was used to determine which master bibliographic record was the 100 millionth. The WorldCat database continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with many of the records entered into the world’s largest bibliographic resource coming from outside the United States, in non-English languages. Libraries added 18.7 million records to WorldCat in 2007 compared with 9.3 million in 2006 and 4.7 million in 2005. Between January 2008 and April 2008, OCLC and its member libraries surpassed another milestone in WorldCat. Slightly less than half (49.75 percent) of the WorldCat database represents English-language materials, while 50.25 percent represents materials in languages other than English, the first time this has happened since the database went online in 1971.
(2008 05 06)
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