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Esteemed PADG colleagues-- Just wanted to share a tool that I only recently found out
about: OCLC’s WorldCat Collection Analysis (or WCA; see the OCLC
Newsletter coverage at: http://www.oclc.org/news/publications/newsletters/oclc/2005/268/downloads/tipsandtricks.pdf).
I’ve argued for more creative use of already available data since I
joined this guild, and lo and behold, our Collection Development colleagues
(here at UConn anyway) have had a subscription to this in their bag of tricks
for some months now. Turns out, it’s pretty easy to find what
individual institutions hold uniquely (and almost uniquely). If your
institution has a subscription to this tool, through the Staff View of
FirstSearch, choose the Collection Analysis tab. From there, choose
“Change Analysis” and then change the Data to Analyze from
“My Library” to “WorldCat Comparison.” Make sure
the radio button for Uniqueness is selected and set the 1st Level to
“Format” (and other levels can be “None”). Run the
Analysis, and you’ve got sets (monographs, serials, etc.) of what your
institution holds uniquely and you can download brief bib citations (as delimited
text files, which open neatly in Excel) for each title by category in chunks of
5000. What with the Google Five and the Open Content Alliance and
all that’s cooking these days, I want to know what we have at my
institution that no one else has—sort of the end around digital queuing
or any registry where I know this stuff won’t appear. And that’s
what this list tells me. Another use suggested by our Cataloging Team
Leader is as a “Do not withdraw” list, for those of us with space-related
pressures in that direction. I’d appreciate hearing from those who
have used this tool as part of Preservation workflows, or if you have other
ideas for such info. Thanks, --DBL David Lowe Preservation Librarian University of Connecticut Libraries |