OCLC is adding bibliographic records for digitized works from the Google Books Library Project and the HathiTrust Digital Library to WorldCat.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
OCLC is working with libraries, Google and the HathiTrust to derive new MARC records that represent these digital collections based on the rich collection of print records contributed to WorldCat by the OCLC membership over the last 40 years. Searchers will begin seeing these records in WorldCat immediately. OCLC will continue to add records for these collections to WorldCat on an ongoing basis.
WorldCat searchers will be able to locate digitized books from these collections and link to the associated book landing page, and in some cases can access the full text of eBooks available through these significant initiatives.
"As part of its mission to make the world's information universally accessible and useful, Google is excited to be surfacing its digitized books through WorldCat," said Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager, Google Books. "We've scanned over 12 million books to date, and look forward to the time when every book in the world is discoverable online. Our partnership with OCLC is an important step toward that goal."
"HathiTrust is enthusiastic about the partnership with OCLC to build our catalog," said John Wilkin, Executive Director of the HathiTrust. "Simultaneously, HathiTrust is striving for greater comprehensiveness in its digital collection, while increasing our attention to coordinating the building of the digital collection with management of our associated print collections. The ability to situate our holdings in the world's most comprehensive and reliable catalog of library materials is a tremendous boon in those endeavors."
As a digital repository for the nation's great research libraries, the HathiTrust Digital Library brings together the immense collections of partner institutions. HathiTrust was conceived as a collaboration of the 13 universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system to establish a repository for these universities to archive and share their digitized collections. More about HathiTrust is at www.hathitrust.org/.
OCLC and the HathiTrust are working together to implement a public interface for the HathiTrust catalog through a WorldCat Local interface, to be introduced later this year.
