Wednesday, October 05, 2005

How many library books?

OCLC is a bibliographic service used by many thousands of libraries worldwide. One of its member libraries recently contributed the billionth holding record to the system, meaning that the OCLC database, called WorldCat, now can lead patrons to a billion books that libraries have on their shelves. This is the number of unique titles times the number of holdings of each title. As you can see the title is The Monkees: The Day-By-Day Story of the 60s TV Pop Sensation. Here's a link to the "find in a library" entry in WorldCat and here's a link to the Amazon page for the book.

This is OCLC's press release about the milestone.
WorldCat reaches 1 billion holdings

At 2:21:34 p.m. EDT on August 11th, 2005, Anne Slane, a cataloger for Worthington (Ohio) Libraries, entered holdings information for the book The Monkees: The Day-By-Day Story of the 60s Pop Sensation, becoming the one billionth holding record in the WorldCat database. OCLC congratulates Anne and all libraries that contribute data to WorldCat.

As expected, the march to the billionth holding was a sprint, with mere fractions of a second separating the entries at the wire.

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