WorldCat’s New Competition
February 23, 2008I was looking through my bloglines subscription today when I came across an article from the SF Chronicle about Open Library. The Chronicle is billing Open Library as a major competitor for WorldCat because it offers everyone the chance to add, edit, and update the information on the books in their database. Not only that, but Open Library allows the user to search the database to see if the book is at a library near them. Granted, the library must be part of the Open Library family, but still… It seems like Web2.0 is finally hitting the official library catalog/databases.
I added a post about this to one of my class’ bulletin boards, and the students were quite enthusiastic. What do you all think? Will this take the place of WorldCat?
Catalogers are not amused by Open Library just as they were by LibraryThing. With no controlled vocabulary, it isn’t, well, controlled! LibraryThing is wildly popular and used by millions just because it is easy. Yes everything isn’t perfect but hey neither are our catalogs. I hope the small libraries who cannot afford WorldCat will use OpenLibrary. Competition is good. I don’t think it will replace WC, but it might tweak them enough to make some reasonable changes.