Open WorldCat
I’m pretty selective about jumping on new technologies. I caught on to email very quickly, because it’s usefulness was immediately apparent to me. I held out on getting a cell phone for a long time, though, and I still don’t use it that often. While I do blog, I haven’t really explored social bookmarking or wikis yet. When I discovered Open WorldCat, though, I immediately had an “Aha!” moment. I think it was because I discovered it by accident while doing a web search.
I discovered something odd, though, when I searched for a book that I know Penn State’s library owns and entered the zip code for Penn State. The first library that shows up is the Mercer County Library in Lawrenceville, NJ, which is probably about a 5 hour drive from Penn State. ricklibrarian writes about how Open WorldCat may be failing rural America. I’m not sure it’s just rural America, though, because while this area is rural, Penn State is no small library. In fact, Open WorldCat recognizes that I am on a Penn State network, and displays a link that will search the Penn State catalog for my book. I wonder if the problem is that Penn State has libraries on multiple campuses, and so it isn’t associated with any single zip code?
