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Arnhem Public Library, the Netherlands, contributes
66 millionth record to WorldCat

Added on April 9, the record was for the sheet music The Songs of Don McLean, by Don McLean. The 65 millionth record was added March 18 by Leiden University Libraries for the book Experimenteren in de woningbouw, a sociology text written in Dutch and published in the Netherlands in 1977. Both were added as part of a project to load the Dutch Union Catalogue into WorldCat.

Arnhem Public Library

F-Shaped pattern for reading Web content

Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe

F for fast. That’s how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your Web site’s words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.

Heatmaps from user eyetracking studies of three websites. The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn't attract any fixations.

In a new eyetracking study, the Nielsen Norman Group recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. They found that users’ main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. According to the study, the dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.
Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.
Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

Obviously, users’ scan patterns are not always comprised of exactly three parts. Sometimes users will read across a third part of the content, making the pattern look more like an E than an F. Other times they’ll only read across once, making the pattern look like a rotated L (with the crossbar at the top). Generally, however, reading patterns roughly resemble an F, though the distance between the top and lower bar varies.

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OCLC to offer Springer Science+Business Media journals

NetLibrary, a division of OCLC and a leading provider of full-text digital content to libraries worldwide, has signed a distribution agreement that will make all Springer Science+Business Media journal titles available through the Electronic Collections Online service.

The Springer Journal collection includes more than 1,200 peer-reviewed journals, with topics spanning biomedicine, life science, clinical medicine, physics, engineering, mathematics, computer science, humanities, business and economics. Springer Science+Business Media is the second largest science, technology and medicine (STM) publisher in the world, publishing 1,450 journals and more than 5,000 new books every year, many of which are also available as NetLibrary eBooks.

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OCLC welcomes these new member libraries

Central Bank of Iceland
Location: Reykjavik, Iceland
OCLC Symbol: ISCBI
OCLC Network: OCLC PICA

Wildlife Disease Information Node
Location: Madison, Wisconsin, USA
OCLC Symbol: WDINR
OCLC Network: WILS

Waldron High School
Location: Waldron, Indiana, USA
OCLC Symbol: INWAL
OCLC Network: INCOLSA

Membership guidelines

WorldCat update

WorldCat is the world’s most comprehensive bibliographic database. Updated at a rate of nearly one new record every 10 seconds, WorldCat contains more than 66 million bibliographic records and 1 billion holdings contributed by more than 9,000 libraries around the world. The Open WorldCat program makes the items in library collections—physical and digital, popular or special—discoverable by people searching the Internet.

See the latest WorldCat record

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