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<h1><font size=4>Two interesting items from today's OCLC
Abstracts:<br><br>
<b>(1) OCLC researchers offer some perspectives on Google’s book
digitization program</b></font></h1>In the September issue of
<a href="http://www.dlib.org/">D-</a><i>Lib</i>
<a href="http://www.dlib.org/"><i>Magazine</a></i>, OCLC Vice President,
Research and Chief Strategist Lorcan Dempsey, along with OCLC researchers
Lynn Silipigni Connaway and Brian Lavoie, provide a preliminary analysis
of the Google Print Library Project (GPLP), Google’s effort to digitize
the collections of several major libraries. The article takes the
collections of the “Google 5”the libraries partnering with Google in the
digitization of their collectionsand looks at characteristics of their
collections when treated as a single unit. The analysis takes place
within the context of WorldCat, the largest, “system-wide” collection of
books available with 32 million records. <br><br>
Among the results:<br><br>
<ul>
<li>The proportion of the system-wide collection covered by GPLP, once
duplicate holdings across the five institutions are removed, is about 33
percent, or 10.5 million unique books out of the 32 million in the
system-wide collection. <br>
<li>The pattern of cross-collection overlap implies that if each
collection were fully digitized, about four out of every ten books would
be re-digitized at least once, or in other words, the GPLP project
reflects a minimum redundancy rate of about 40 percent. <br>
<li>Only 3 percent of the books in the 10.5 million GPLP collection are
held by all five libraries. <br>
<li>More than 80 percent of the materials in the Google 5 collections are
still in copyright. <br>
<li>The resource created by the GPLP may be far more culturally diverse
than originally anticipated, given the fact that more than 430 languages
were identified and that English language materials are slightly less
than half of the books in the Google 5 combined collection.
</ul><br>
<a href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/lavoie/09lavoie.html">View
article </a><br>
<a href="http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000800.html">Lorcan Dempsey’s
weblog</a><br><br>
(2) <h2><font size=4><b>InnovativeOCLC partnership bridges Open WorldCat
and Millennium with Google, Yahoo! and other search engines</font>
</b></h2>Innovative Interfaces has completed a project to link Open
WorldCat with more than 700 Innovative public and academic local library
systems in North America. Users of search engine tools like Google and
Yahoo! Search will be able to view local items from Innovative libraries
with just a few mouse clicks.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.iii.com/news/pr_template.php?id=261">View news
release</a> <br><br>
-Sue<br>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
Suzanne Lorimer<br>
Coordinator of Research Services<br>
Research Services and Collections Department<br>
226 Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University<br>
P.O. Box 208240<br>
130 Wall Street<br>
New Haven, CT 06520-8240<br>
(phone) 203-432-8371 (fax) 203-432-8527<br>
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