Posts tagged under: Data

3 million knocks on library doors every day

API_blogHow do we help information seekers find library resources online? OCLC began asking that question more than 10 years ago. The 2005 Perceptions Report showed that almost nobody began information searches at library websites. Aware of the changes in information seeking behavior, we’d begun the OCLC “Open WorldCat” program in 2003 in order to get library metadata into popular online services. Open WorldCat provided direct access to the data in WorldCat to a variety of search and discovery providers who then linked users back to resources in member libraries.

At the end of the pilot that launched Open WorldCat, we were getting around 4,000 hits per day, which we considered successful enough to warrant moving forward. We have continued to add services that drive users to OCLC services and member libraries. One of our fastest-growing services is our suite of APIs.

Today, we’re seeing more than 3 million hits per day to OCLC APIs.

What makes that possible? One reason is that the diversity of APIs we offer allows a range of partners to tap into the cooperative’s resources for a variety of purposes. A quick look at one of

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Four interlibrary loan trends to watch in 2016

Top ILL titles for 2015

At least once a year, we query the WorldShare ILL database and see how the trends in interlibrary loan are developing. We count titles a little differently than other lists. Rather than splitting into fiction/nonfiction we look at loan requests vs. copy requests (loans of an entire book vs. a request to copy a single article or part of a larger work). The list of top copy requests is, as you might expect, heavily weighted toward the medical, psychological and scientific realms. It’s the loan requests that are more interesting.

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Transforming data into impact

2016-02-03 Skip intro post 4

Last September, I found an interesting Forbes article, “20 Mind-Boggling Big Data Facts Everyone Must Read.” Most of them were of the “very big numbers” variety; how many billions of connected devices there are, how many photos we took on our smartphones last year, how much is being invested in big data projects, etc. I think we’ve gotten used to the idea that “big data” is really big.

The only fact on the Forbes list I found really “mind-boggling” was the last one: that of all the data collected in the world, only about half a percent is ever analyzed.

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