Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, and Bibliothèque nationale de France have signed a letter of intent to work cooperatively to add records from the French national library to OCLC's WorldCat. WorldCat is one of the world's largest online resources for finding information in libraries.
Bibliothèque nationale de France and OCLC signed the document during the IFLA World Library and Information Congress: 74th IFLA General Conference and Council in Québec, Canada. Once an agreement is finalised, OCLC anticipates processing an estimated 13.2 million bibliographic records from Bibliothèque nationale de France. When records are added to WorldCat, they will be more visible and accessible to web users worldwide.
OCLC and Bibliothèque nationale de France have previously worked together on other projects, such as the cooperative effort to create the Virtual International Authority File (Fichier d'Autorité International Virtuel), which virtually combines multiple name authority files into a single name authority service, and French translations of the Dewey Decimal Classification system.
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 US, in non-English languages. Between July 1, 2007 and June 30, 2008, records from the National Library of Sweden, Swiss National Library, National Library of Australia and National Library of New Zealand were added to WorldCat. In 1998, about one-third of the WorldCat database represented non-English-language work. This year, for the first time ever, WorldCat contained slightly more records representing non-English language materials than for English.
