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

In the September issue of D-Lib 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 collections—and 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.

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Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog

Web image sites show explosive growth, corresponding to sharp rise in blogging activity

NetRatings, Inc., a global leader in Internet media and market research, reports that traffic to image hosting Web sites has skyrocketed due to the massive rise in blogging activity seen since the beginning of this year. As a category, image hosting sites have grown 406 percent to more than 14.7 million unique users since January 2005, accounting for nearly 10 percent of active U.S. Internet users.

Nielsen/Net Ratings also reported that for August 2005, the top five Web sites by brand were Yahoo!, Microsoft, MSN, Google and AOL with 101,283,000, 95,621,000, 92,059,000, 80,354,000 and 75,721,000 unique visitors, respectively.

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Innovative—OCLC 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.

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OCLC welcomes these new member libraries

The American Numismatic Association
Location: Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA
OCLC Symbol: COANA
OCLC Network: BCR

International Academy of Design & Technology
Location: Schaumburg, Illinois, USA
OCLC Symbol: IADTL
OCLC Network: ILLINET

Membership guidelines and protocols

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 61 million bibliographic records and 1 billion holdings contributed by more than 8,600 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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