If you've already set up links to your favorite WorldCat.org resources, never fear. All those links will also continue to work.

A bit of background: the Geek the Library campaign is administered by OCLC and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to help raise awareness about the need for public library support in communities both large and small. The grant is currently running for U.S. libraries, and the pilot program has been going on since last year in Georgia and Iowa.

Geek the Library Week is designed as a celebration, but it also highlights the Geek the Library message about the challenging funding issues many U.S. public libraries face. From California to Massachusetts, countless libraries are struggling with difficult budget decisions. If there was ever a time to speak out in support of public libraries, the time is now. Your voice can make a difference.

It's 2010, and thousands of books have already been published: fiction for kids, fiction for adults, biography, nonfiction for kids, nonfiction for adults, as well as new music, and DVDs.

The links above are for generic types not on particular subjects. Tens of thousands of WorldCat catalogers have added subject headings to millions of records, primarily using the Library of Congress Subject Headings. These are the hotlinked subject headings you see under "More Like This" and "Related Subjects". They are chosen from a controlled vocabulary by cataloging experts and ensure that items with the same focus use the same terminology.

Unlike the general keyword index, which matches terms anywhere in records, the subject headings index is much more precise, while at the same time, less forgiving.

Subject headings provide precise hotlinks to similar items, but it's best to use the subject hotlinks in records because guessing and using the wrong terms instead of the controlled vocabularly used by catalogers can give you poor results. Once you have some subject headings that you like, you can save them for future use to show you high-quality results in that subject area. You can also limit them to specific languages, ranges of publication years, and by format, content, and audience. Each of the following is limited to English non-fiction books published in 2010. On January 1, 2010, some links matched no books, but new items are added every day.

* Economic Development: adult, juvenile.
* Genealogy: adult, juvenile.
* Global Warming: adult, juvenile.
* Globalization: adult, juvenile.
* Nutrition: adult, juvenile.
* Presidents: adult, juvenile.
* Social Networks: adult, juvenile.
* Sports Doping: adult, juvenile.
* United Nations: adult, juvenile.

Of course, subject headings can be used to find fiction. Instead of saving a search with a particular year, you can save a search with a sorting option to show the most recent publications first, such as with these juvenile offerings: Wizards, Witches, Vikings, or Dragons.

Final Tip: You can remove the language, year, format and other limits in the "Refine Your Search" section on the left side of the results. Just click on "All Languages", "All Years", etc.

The popular Professors' Guide blog reminded their readers last week to use e-resources, WorldCat.org (tip #3!), ILL and living, breathing reference librarians in their post, Writing a Paper? Try these 7 Research Tips.

You may remember that the Professors Guide featured ways to get more out of your college library last March (2009), so it's definitely one to watch if you have rising high school seniors or first year undergraduates in your midst!

As an information professional who pursues genealogy as a hobby, I am always interested in utilizing and sharing resources more likely to be known to professionals in my field. During the past few weeks, I've been delighted by one of the popular genealogy-blogging themes, 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy where each of the prompts so far this year have been designed to encourage genealogists to further explore and use their library resources; in fact, the series creator is a librarian herself . Week 5 of the series has particular emphasis here because the goal was to encourage hundreds of genea-bloggers to explore WorldCat.org and I'm a huge personal fan of WorldCat.

So, from Jan 30 - Feb 5 many geneabloggers took an opportunity to check you out WorldCat - did you notice any spikes in your usage? I wrote to WorldCat to let them know of these goings-on in case they were unaware, but someone was paying attention! Alice, one of the WorldCat bloggers wrote me back noting that she'd seen this and asked me to do a guest post. I was honored at the invitation! If you'd like to read some of the responses to the challenge, you can visit the group roll-up feed at the GeneaBloggers website though at the time of this writing, everyone is now working on Week 7 so you may have to scroll down some to see those from Week 5.

The posts are a great opportunity for WorldCat to better understand searching behavior and how a variety of individuals interact with the site as they seek to make improvements and updates. I hope too that all my fellow geneabloggers out there have also come to understand just how valuable this resource can be for family history research. I use this site almost daily. And it's great that it's also on my Android phone.... :-)

1. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
2. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
3. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
4. Dear John by Nicholas Sparks
5. Push by Sapphire
6. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
7. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
9. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
10. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
11. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling
12. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
13. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
14. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
15. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
16. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
17. Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man by Steve Harvey
18. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett
19. Going Rogue by Sarah Palin
20. Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child

Gone from the list:

6. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
7. Delphine by Molly Bang
8. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
13. Sea Swept by Nora Roberts
14. Cajun Night Before Christmas by Trosclair
18. The Sounds of Slavery by Shane White and Graham White
19. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

OAIster records will continue to be indexed in WorldCat.org, of course, and will be integrated in WorldCat.org search results along with "regular" records from thousands of libraries worldwide.

What is OAIster again?

OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources hosted at the University of Michigan since 2002. Launched with grant support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, OAIster was developed to test the feasibility of building a portal to open-archive collections using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). In 2009, OCLC formed a partnership with the University of Michigan in order to provide continued access to open-archive collections through the OAIster database.

What does it mean for you?

Access to 23 million records for open-archive collections, contributed by more than 1,100 organizations worldwide.

So go check it out and get busy making your lists and widgetizing them!

1. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association which was added by 2252 institutions.
2. Eidi, has reading level of elementary and junior high school. Eidi was added by 1927 institutions.
3. How to Build Your own Country, is appropriate for primary (elementary) school readers. It's been added by 1899 institutions.
4. Million-Dollar Throw also for elementary and junior high school readers. 1827 institutions added Million-Dollar Throw.
5. Touchdown: The Power and Precision of Football's Perfect Play also appropriate for elementary and junior high school readers. It has been added by 1790 institutions.

All of the above, except the number one spot, were Junior Library Guild selections.

The most recently added items lists appear on the WorldCat Library's profile page, such as our metro library here in Columbus. You can find your own local library's profile by searching WorldCat Libraries, if they are a WorldCat library, you can see their recent items. This month 716 libraries show up with new items giving us a total of 14,014 institutions that added new materials within WorldCat.

When you visit your library's recent items list, you can subscribe to the list with RSS and get updates each month in your RSS reader.

A nice touch in their catalog, too, is the library map display. So when you find an item you're interested in, it shows you the handy schematic of where you find it in the library building. I know all too well the woes of wandering all over, looking at call numbers on shelves in an unfamiliar library location.

While we won't be able to include that level of granularity on WorldCat.org for a long time (!) Wade's mashup shows how putting two things together, with a little developer elbow grease, can really create a super useful tool that more than doubles the value. (Of course, since he's a WorldCat Mashathon alumni, would we expect anything less?)

A "library type" facet has been added to the "Find a library near you" functionality, so you can narrow your library search results even quicker. Options include choices of:

• Academic Research Libraries (ARLs)


• Academic libraries


• Archives


• Governmental libraries


• Library Networks


• Public libraries


• Schools


• Corporate or Special libraries

Search for your favorite library, through WorldCat.org!

JSTOR is a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive with more than 4.5 million records from 1,000+ academic journals and selected monographs. It includes archives of more than one thousand leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work.

WorldCat.org indexing of JSTOR metadata helps researchers more easily identify resources in the collection. An authorization is required for access to full-text materials in JSTOR.

Learn more about the JSTOR Archives. >>

WorldCat.org results are made possible through the WorldCat Search API and WorldCat Registry APIs. More about both of these tools in the Web Services for developers area. Note that right now RedLaser serves up results for books in the U.S. It's not that we (WorldCat) or they (Occipital) don't want to serve up more results for videos, CDs, DVDs, games, magazines--all the content a library offers (no matter where in the world you or your library is)--but they're trying to walk before they run, and run before they fly. We all look forward to flying with RedLaser.

In the meantime, remember the WorldCat Mobile pilot is still available for ANY Web-enabled phone in the UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Canada and the US. If your phone doesn't support apps, there is a Web "lite" version that comes up. Plus we're also simultaneously exploring how to make the whole site itself, WorldCat.org, more mobile-friendly so you can have your profile, lists and everything else at hand, in your hand.

1. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
2. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
3. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
4. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
5. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
6. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
7. Delphine by Molly Bang
8. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
9. Push by Sapphire
10. Going Rogue by Sarah Palin
11. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
12. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
13. Sea Swept by Nora Roberts
14. Cajun Night Before Christmas by Trosclair
15. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling
16. Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man by Steve Harvey
17. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
18. The Sounds of Slavery by Shane White and Graham White
19. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
20. Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child

Gone from the list:

Nursing Theorists and Their Work edited by Ann Marriner-Tomey and Martha Raile Alligood
Peace, Love & Baby Ducks by Lauren Myracle
Hope's Boy by Andrew Bridge
MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers by Joseph Gibaldi and the Modern Language Association of America
The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman
Molly's Pilgrim by Barbara Cohen
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days by Jeff Kinney

Saturday, January 16
Reaching Consumers through Nontraditional Methods: What Can WorldCat Do for You?
An interactive panel of librarians, library users and industry leaders share strategies of how WorldCat.org helps them reach consumers, researchers, developers and partner organizations through social tools, mobile apps, APIs and more. Speakers include:
• Graeme Williams, a superpatron from the Waltham Public Library
• Jennifer Freidman, Collections Manager and Public Services Librarian at MIT
• Andrew Yu, Mobile platform Manager and Architect at MIT
• Roy Tennant, technologist and co-founder of the OCLC Developer Network
• Cindy Cunningham, director for OCLC partnership programs
• our own Jasmine De Gaia, global product manager for WorldCat.org
10:30 a.m. - 12:00 noon, Westin Waterfront, Hancock Room

Single-search Access to Your Library's Electronic Resources from OCLC
Learn how your library can offer single-search access to your print, electronic and digital resources through WorldCat.org, WorldCat Local and WorldCat Local "quick start."
1:30 - 3:30 p.m., Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, Room 162 A/B

Sunday, January 17
WorldCat: New Dimensions in Growth and Quality
Learn how OCLC is building and enriching WorldCat, including synchronization of local library collections and WorldCat, and new metadata management enhancements that increase discoverability of library collections on the Web.
10:30 a.m. - 12:00 noon, Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, Room 157 C

Local Impact--Global Reach: WorldCat Local for Your Library
Hear implementation and usage experiences from librarians who use WorldCat Local. Speakers include:
• Barbara Glackin, Head of Cataloging and Online Catalog, Boise State University
• Nina McHale, Web Librarian, University of Colorado, Denver
• Kari Schmidt, Electronic Resources Librarian and Head of the Electronic Resources Management Unit, American University
1:30 - 3:30 p.m., Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, Room 104 A/B

Register now to reserve your spot at these ALA Midwinter sessions.