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Vancouver Public Library fields the 1 millionth question
on QuestionPoint

At 6:25 p.m. Pacific Time September 13, a user of the Vancouver Public Library in British Columbia, Canada, logged on to the Ask Us A Question service with a simple query: “What do I need to do to get a library card?”

It turned out to be the 1 millionth question logged on QuestionPoint, the virtual reference desk developed by OCLC and the Library of Congress and the system that hosts Vancouver’s service. Valerie Wettlaufer of the Vancouver library answered the question later that day.

QuestionPoint is a network of reference librarians that serves users via the Web. It is bringing the professionalism of librarianship to Web reference assistance and helping librarians move one of their traditional strengths, the face-to-face reference interview, into the digital age. Vancouver’s Ask Us A Question service uses QuestionPoint to answer questions for their local community. They can also refer questions to the QuestionPoint network, which consists of more than 800 libraries in 21 countries.

Among the questions handled by QuestionPoint over the past few years:

• I need the total international retail sales figure for apparel sales only.

• Is Columbia University the first medical school or the University of Philadelphia?

• Does the Los Angeles Public Library have ‘slides’ of Iceland for presentation purposes that I can check out?

See more questions
QuestionPoint brochure

Broadband adoption in the United States: Growing but slowing

The growth in home high-speed Internet adoption, after growing quickly in the past several years, has slowed down and is poised to slow even further, according to a new report released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

According to the Project’s May 2005 survey, 53 percent of home Internet users go online using broadband connections compared with 50 percent in December 2004, a small but statistically insignificant increase. This is a slower growth rate than in a comparable time frame a year earlier; from November 2003 to May 2004, home high-speed penetration grew by 20 percent, from 35 percent of home users to 42 percent.

View news release

eBook Subject Sets now available
for school libraries

Nine new sets of eBooks from NetLibrary for K-12 schools make it easy for students and teachers to use the library—no matter where they are. Each Subject Set focuses on a specific type of content, such as biographies, study guides or science experiments. Sets include titles from major publishers, including HarperCollins, Penguin and Millbrook Press.

More information

OCLC welcomes these new member libraries

All Saints Catholic Academy
Location: Naperville, Illinois, USA
OCLC Symbol: ILASC
OCLC Network: ILLINET

Midrand Graduate Institute
Location: Halfway House, South Africa
OCLC Symbol: ZAMGI
OCLC Network: OCLC PICA

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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