BHL is pleased to announce that it has added its bibliographic records to OCLC’s WorldCat® database, “the world’s largest network of library content and services.” You can now find BHL e-books via https://www.worldcat.org/. With thousands of libraries worldwide participating in OCLC, contributing our records to this “global library cooperative” allows us to extend the discoverability and access of BHL e-books through its variety of tools and services [1].
If you have access to OCLC metadata service products, please look for the OCLC symbol “BHLMR” when reviewing holdings.
If you are an OCLC participating library interested in adding BHL records to your own catalog, please feel free!
Some key points to keep in mind when viewing or working with BHL records in WorldCat:
- Current BHL holdings in WorldCat reflect our collection’s bibliographic records as of Fall 2019.
- Not every title you find in BHL will be in WorldCat. Only titles with full text available directly within BHL are being provided to OCLC. We are not providing records for titles indexed in our collection that link out to content available via third-party websites.
- For example, you will find Crawshay’s The birds of Tierra del Fuego (1907) in WorldCat.org. But you will not find Flora Ibérica as this title is indexed in BHL but held directly within the Biblioteca Digital del Real Jardin Botanico de Madrid.
- BHL will load records into WorldCat on a quarterly basis going forward.
- As we curate title records within the BHL collection and make changes on our end, we will work with OCLC to update records on a periodic basis.
We are thankful to the kind folks at OCLC who worked diligently and patiently with us to develop a workflow for exporting and uploading the variety of records aggregated into our digital collection from hundreds of contributors worldwide.
[1] https://www.oclc.org/en/about.html
Bianca Crowley is the Digital Collections Manager for the Biodiversity Heritage Library, headquartered at Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. She has spent her career in this role helping consortium Partners grow and curate BHL's collection. Her main responsibilities revolve around program administration and collection management, but you can also find her tackling technical development, documentation, copyright, and cataloging issues as time allows. She received her MSLIS from The Catholic University of America.
Good morning,
I work at the Laval University Library in Quebec city. I was wondering who I could contact to offer some suggestions to improve the finding of your documents in OCLC’s discovery tool.
Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
Anne-Marie Fortier
Bibliothèque de l’Université Laval
Hi Anne-Marie,
Thanks so much for using the Biodiversity Heritage Library and for offering your feedback on accessing our records. Please feel free to submit your feedback via our Contact Us form: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/contact#/comments.