Global library cooperative OCLC, US, has announced that the National Diet Library has successfully added 4 million records to WorldCat, an online resource for finding library materials. With this initiative, the Library seeks to make its research resources more visible and accessible to scholars, students and Web searchers worldwide.
In June 2010, OCLC and the National Diet Library announced their agreement to cooperate for the benefit of libraries, library patrons and end users of information services. OCLC staff from Leiden, the Netherlands, and Dublin, Ohio, USA, worked with the National Diet Library staff to create a conversion programme to convert JAPAN/MARC to MARC 21 records. Cataloging staff with language expertise were also critical to the successful data conversion and load into WorldCat.
The addition of Japan's National Diet Library records increases the number of records containing CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) script data in WorldCat by nearly 33 percent.
The National Diet Library has been using WorldCat for current cataloging of Western language materials since 2007. Through the new agreement with OCLC, the Library will contribute the contents of the JAPAN/MARC database, the official national bibliography of Japan, to WorldCat on a regular basis. It will send updates of bibliographic records about four times a year and will provide JAPAN/MARC authority records.
Kinokuniya Company Ltd., OCLC's distributor in Japan for 24 years, helped to facilitate this cooperative effort.
WorldCat is a database of bibliographic information built continuously by OCLC libraries around the world since 1971. Each record in the WorldCat database contains a bibliographic description of a single item or work and a list of institutions that hold the item. The institutions share these records, using them to create local catalogues, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work. Libraries contribute records for items not found in WorldCat using the OCLC shared cataloging system. Since 1971, 200 million records have been added to WorldCat, spanning more than 6,000 years of recorded knowledge, from about 4800 B.C. to the present.
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