OCLC Modifies WorldCat URLs

NEWS, catalog • Comments (1)

Mar 16

Most of the information community is agreed that the higher the quality of your metadata (including the various forms of identifiers available), the more discoverable your content will be for users. That said, most users have difficulty recalling such unique identifiers as an ISBN or OCLC record number when seeking out a particular title.

That's why it was interesting to see OCLC's recent blog announcement regarding a tweak they have introduced to updating the URLs in Worldcat.

If you hold your cursor over one of the links appearing just below, you'll see that each generates a search in Worldcat, but uses a simplified structure (worldcat domain, title, and the actual title of the work) to execute that search.

[ http://www.worldcat.org/title/enchanted-hunters ] Enchanted Hunters by Maria Tatar
[ http://www.worldcat.org/title/wolf-hall ] Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel
[ http://www.worldcat.org/title/gait-disorders ] Gait Disorders by Michael Ronthal

A blogger, a faculty member, or an information professional can easily create such links to WorldCat in their own context -- book review, course syllabus, or bibliography -- to Worldcat and make it easy for those clicking on the link to find the book in which they have an interest. Current links with the more complex structures that include OCLC record numbers still work but the new approach is, in the words of OCLC, "more intuitive, more mashable and more search engine friendly". It is worth noting however (in the interest of precision) the comments appended to the OCLC blog entry.