Outgoing

100 Million OCLC Numbers

OCLC # 100,000,000 was created today in WorldCat.  In the late 70's when I first started working with WorldCat (then affectionately called the OLUC for Online Union Catalog) it had 3+ million records, so there has been a 30-fold increase in record numbers in that time, much of the growth coming in the last few years.

The main reasons for the recent growth are the addition of more cataloging from around the world, the loading of RLG records, and the assigning of OCLC numbers to article-level metadata.  We've also changed the rules a bit.  We no longer try to merge metadata expressed in different languages, so records from different national libraries will almost all receive new OCLC numbers, even though WorldCat might have a description of the item in another language (that is the descriptions are in different languages, even though they are describing the same item).

In the future an even larger change will be apparent.  As we load institutional records from RLG, each of those records will be assigned its own OCLC number (they will also be linked to the master record that corresponds to the RLG cluster they were in).  This will absorb quite a few numbers, and if extended to the rest of the cooperative, the one billionth OCLC number might well be a possibility.

--Th

Update:  We pulled a copy of WorldCat shortly after OCLC #100,000,000 and found 83,286,767 bibliographic records (a 12% growth in three months).

Related post: Counting records in WorldCat

Watch WorldCat Grow: http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/grow.htm

Forgotten people

Lorcan was in my office looking at Identity timelines recently.  It is easy to find people whose publications are more common now than they used to be, probably because of the huge growth in publication in general, coupled with an increase in higher education (or third level education as Lorcan put it).  It's a bit harder to think of someone that is no longer popular.  So I wrote a little program to look for us.

There are many thousands of people with more publications before 1800 than after, and even around a 150 people who have at least 100 manifestations in WorldCat and a publication history that shows more published in the 17th than the 18th, more in the 18th than the 19th and more in the 19th than the 20th century.  Here are a few examples:

Gilbert Burnet, a Scottish theologian and historian

Henry Hammond, an English clergyman

John Tillotson, an English Archbishop

Charles Drelincourt, a French Protestant

Philippe Labbe, a French Jesuit

Well, almost forgotten.  Most of the 150 have Wikipedia articles about them.

--Th