WorldCat, an online database of resources available through libraries around the world, has announced that it has reached another major milestone with the addition of its 2 billionth holding.
On May 4, at 2:58 a.m. MDT, the holding symbol for the University of Alberta Libraries, in Edmonton, was set through an automated process to the WorldCat record for the e-book, Evaluation of the City of Lakes Family Health Team Patient Portal Pilot Project: Final Report, published in 2012 by the Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research. It was the 2 billionth holding set in WorldCat. The e-book catalogue record was created by the Canadian Electronic Book Library and was enhanced through OCLC's automated authority control processing system.
WorldCat is a database of bibliographic information created and continuously updated by some 25,000 OCLC member libraries around the world. Its records describe specific works and contain a listing of institutions that own an item, referred to as 'holdings'. Institutions use holdings information to create local catalogues, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work.
WorldCat was created in 1971 so that libraries could share cataloguing information from a central database, increasing workflow efficiency and the ability to locate and loan materials. It took the OCLC cooperative almost 34 years, from August 26, 1971 to August 11, 2005, to add 1 billion holdings in WorldCat. It has taken just seven years and eight months to add the next billion holdings.
WorldCat spans six millennia of recorded knowledge, from about 4800 B.C. to the present. It encompasses records for books, serials, sound recordings, musical scores, maps, visual materials, mixed materials and computer files.
