[Yulpub] News from OCLC

[Suzanne Lorimer]

Two interesting items from today's OCLC Abstracts:

(1) OCLC researchers offer some perspectives on Google’s book digitization 
program

In the September issue of <http://www.dlib.org/>D-Lib 
<http://www.dlib.org/>Magazine, 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.

Among the results:

    * 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.
    * 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.
    * Only 3 percent of the books in the 10.5 million GPLP collection are 
held by all five libraries.
    * More than 80 percent of the materials in the Google 5 collections are 
still in copyright.
    * 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.

<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/lavoie/09lavoie.html>View article
<http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000800.html>Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog

(2)

Innovative­OCLC partnership bridges Open WorldCat and Millennium with 
Google, Yahoo! and other search engines

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.

<http://www.iii.com/news/pr_template.php?id=261>View news release

-Sue

Suzanne Lorimer
Coordinator of Research Services
Research Services and Collections Department
226 Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University
P.O. Box 208240
130 Wall Street
New Haven, CT  06520-8240
(phone) 203-432-8371  (fax) 203-432-8527
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