The University of Delaware Library has announced that it now provides access to WorldCat Local, a network of library-based content and services. WorldCat Local combines the cooperative power of OCLC member libraries worldwide with the ability to customise WorldCat.org as a solution for local discovery and delivery services. The University of Delaware Library is one of the first libraries in the US to offer this new service.
The WorldCat Local service encompasses the holdings of more than 10,000 libraries around the world, including the University of Delaware Library. It includes records for more than 100 million books, CDs, DVDs, maps and Internet resources, as well as archival materials. The database is continually updated, with a new record added, on average, every 10 seconds.
WorldCat Local also contains more than 57 million article-level records from more than 36,000 journals and 100,000 conference proceedings extracted from the ArticleFirst, British Library Inside Serials, ERIC, GPO (Government Printing Office), H.W. Wilson and PubMed databases. Now, in a single search, users can easily identify a wide range of high-quality research materials, as well as browse search results by author, format or year of publication.
Introduced as a pilot in April 2007, WorldCat Local builds on WorldCat.org, which allows web access to the world's richest database for discovery of materials held in libraries. Through a locally branded interface, the service provides libraries the ability to search the entire WorldCat database and present localised results most accessible to the patron. These include internal special collections, collections shared in a consortium, and open access collections.
