WorldCat

international union library catalog

WorldCat is a very big online catalog, a list of books and things like books in tens of thousands of libraries in many countries.[2]

WorldCat
Five-color WorldCat emblem, with WorldCat in black letters and OCLC in smaller grey letters
Type of site
Network of library content and services
Available in
  • Chinese (Simplified)
  • Chinese (Traditional)
  • Czech
  • Dutch
  • English
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Korean
  • Japanese
  • Portuguese
  • Spanish
  • Thai
  • Urdu
OwnerOnline Computer Library Center
URLsearch.worldcat.org Edit this at Wikidata
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional, but some features require registration (such as writing reviews and making lists or bibliographies)
LaunchedJanuary 21, 1998; 26 years ago (1998-01-21)[1]
Current statusOnline
Content license
Copyright policy
OCLC number756372754

WorldCat was built by OCLC, which is an organization of libraries. WorldCat is maintained by the group of libraries in OCLC.[3]

History

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In the 1970s, OCLC grew from a regional computer system for 54 Ohio colleges into an international network.[4]

In 1979, the first Canadian and the first international library joined OCLC.[4]

Timeline

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On August 26, 1971, the OCLC Online Union Catalog, now called WorldCat, went online.[5]

References

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  1. 1998 is the date of registry of the WorldCat.org domain; see: "WorldCat.org WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info – DomainTools". WHOIS. Retrieved 2017-01-21. However, the union catalog that became WorldCat was started three decades earlier, and it was already available on the web to subscriber libraries at OCLC.org several years before WorldCat.org was a registered domain name; see: "OCLC.org WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info – DomainTools". WHOIS. Retrieved 2019-06-26.
  2. "About OCLC". OCLC. Archived from the original on 2022-03-11. Retrieved 2022-03-11.
  3. OCLC, "Vision, the world's libraries connected"; retrieved 2012-10-19.
  4. 4.0 4.1 OCLC, "History of OCLC; retrieved 2012-10-19.
  5. OCLC, "Brief history of OCLC activities with national libraries outside the U.S."; retrieved 2012-10-19.

More reading

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Other websites

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