• Collections & Technical Services
• May 07
• Issue: 212

OCLC Control Numbers: To 100 Million and Beyond!

A record receiving OCLC Control Number 100,000,000 was added to WorldCat on March 29, 2007, by the Windsor Public Library in Connecticut (OCLC symbol CKE).

They contributed cataloging for the book: It’s a Horse’s Life!: Advice and Observations for the Humans Who Choose to Share It. But the Control Number explosion is just beginning. Since Monday, March 26, 2007, cataloging users have started to see significant increases in the size of OCLC Control Numbers as OCLC began the process of assigning OCLC numbers to article citation records. These article citation records will be added to WorldCat.org in support of a mid-April release of the next phase of WorldCat.org development.

Although the citation records themselves will not be added to WorldCat and will not be visible to other users until the release of the next phase of WorldCat.org, their presence caused a massive leap in the size of OCLC Control Numbers assigned to newly cataloged works. According to OCLC’s WorldCat Watch (at http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/default.htm) as of April 19, 2007, there were over 84 million (84,123,172 to be exact) OCLC records for items available for discovery in WorldCat.

[OCLC - edited Lauren Pinsley, OCLC Services Manager, Nylink]

Collections & Technical Services Contact Information

Please contact Lauren Pinsley (pinsleyl@nylink.org), Lynne Graziadei (graziadeil@nylink.org) or Mary Edgerton (edgertonm@nylink.org) at Nylink with any questions. They are available via email or phone (518-443-5444/800-342-3353).