Thing #12

NetLibrary

I have a love/hate relationship with NetLibrary. I like it better than I used to since it easier to navigate now but I wish our subscription (State paid for) included downloadable audiobooks and more titles we picked out. There is only a tiny bit of money spent on new titles every year and I'd like to get many more.

I do find it useful for those very specific business titles that probably won't circulate much but are just the thing for a particular customer. I really like some of the older out of copyright titles that I used to read mostly on Project Gutenberg's site. I don't know if anyone else in OCL is a big Gene Stratton-Porter fan but if you want to go beyond Freckles and Girl of the Limberlost, NetLibrary has many titles.

I wrote the optional advanced exercises that deal with Project Gutenberg and Bartleby.com. They are two sites I use at work and for my own enjoyment. I really like that Project Gutenberg takes such care in converting the texts with so many checks and doublechecks for accuracy. I also like that the texts are in plain text ASCII so they are compatible with just about everything. That's planning for legacy formats! I'd like to volunteer for Project Gutenberg some day as one of their proofreaders. What they are doing is such important support for scholarship.

WorldCat

I like to play on WorldCat. I use it all the time when I'm working on the reference desk but sometimes it is just fun to see who owns a book. I'm writing a recommendation now about keeping our collection linked on WorldCat. That costs money but except for that, I don't see a downside. As a full participant in WorldCat, our collection is Google-able and that is going to bring us users we not reaching the old ways. A clearer explanation of the advantages of our participation in WorldCat than I'm giving can be found here on the OCLC website.

Have you found the links for FirstSearch within WorldCat and the extra information FirstSearch gives including the link directly to that title's record in our IPAC?