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OCLC and Yahoo! provide the ability to search the Web and the richest database of items in libraries with a co-branded toolbar

OCLC, the world’s largest library cooperative, and Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company, today announced a pilot program that leverages the strength of the Yahoo! Toolbar and Yahoo! Search to enable consumers to explore the Web and WorldCat, the OCLC Online Union Catalog. The program offers information consumers a co-branded toolbar that provides one-click access to 2 million of the most popular records found in WorldCat, a central catalog of library holdings created and maintained collectively by more than 9,000 libraries.

The Yahoo!/OCLC toolbar, which can be downloaded from OCLC’s Web site, is a project associated with Open WorldCat, a new OCLC initiative designed to increase the online visibility of libraries and their collections. The toolbar enables consumers to limit search results to WorldCat records and helps them locate libraries in their vicinity that have the item they are looking for.

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Microsoft launches its own Web Search Tool

Microsoft Corporation unveiled a preliminary version of its new Web search engine last week, its first attack on Google’s leading position in the market, according to a report from Reuters.com. Microsoft said its new search engine will cull results from a database index of more than 5 billion Web documents and pages and integrate results that link directly into its MSN Music service, which was launched in September.

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Watch WorldCat grow from your workstation!

On average, a new record and 13 new holdings go into the world’s richest database of library items every 10 seconds

A new feature to the Watch WorldCat Grow screen on the OCLC Web site now lets you view the number of holdings, as well as new records, as they are added to WorldCat. The counter lists total holdings in WorldCat and the number of holdings added in the last 10 seconds. It also displays eight fields of the latest new record added to WorldCat—OCLC number, title, author, publisher, publication date, language, format and contributing institution.

Go to the counter

OCLC welcomes the following new member libraries

American University of Puerto Rico
Location: Bayamón, Puerto Rico
OCLC Symbol: AUOPR
OCLC Network: SOLINET

Century Oaks School
Location: Elgin, Illinois, USA
OCLC Symbol: ILCOE
OCLC Network: ILLINET

Membership guidelines and protocols

WorldCat update

Every 10 seconds an OCLC member library adds a new record to WorldCat, which contained more than 56 million records representing 944,022,672 holding locations as of November 13, 2004. Every 4 seconds an OCLC member library fills an interlibrary loan request using WorldCat, which has supported 140,174,314 interlibrary loan requests as of November 13, 2004. A library user searches WorldCat using the OCLC FirstSearch service every second.

See the latest WorldCat record

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OCLC Abstracts uses the Internet to deliver timely information about OCLC services, programs, news and events directly to subscribers’ desktops. This e-journal augments and complements OCLC’s Web site and print communications.