#OCLC

[peachdoxie]

Okay, OCLC BibFormats, why did you update your reference pages so now instead of easily clicking 1xx or 5xx or whatever and having all the xxs be easily on the sidebar, you now list ALL of them in the sidebar so I have to scroll ten miles to get to the right field? Crap update.

#anecdotes by peachdoxie #oclc

[thepotentialof2007]

Over the past several months, Anna’s Archive has been secretly scraping WorldCat, the world’s largest book metadata database.

WorldCat is run by the non-profit organization OCLC and works with tens of thousands of libraries globally. Its database is proprietary and not freely available but Anna’s Archive managed to bypass the restrictions, to make their own copy freely available.

“Even though OCLC is a non-profit, their business model requires protecting their database. Well, we’re sorry to say, friends at OCLC, we’re giving it all away,” Anna’s Archive notes.

PS: We do want to give a genuine shout-out to the Worldcat team. Even though it was a small tragedy that your data was locked up, you did an amazing job at getting 30,000 libraries on board to share their metadata with you. As with many of our releases, we could not have done it without the decades of hard work you put into building the collections that we now liberate. Truly: thank you.

The meta-search engine says it managed to scrape a staggering three terabytes of metadata. The dataset includes 1.3 billion unique IDs that, after removing duplicates and other noise, equate to 700 million unique records.

_

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:OCLC

Internet Archive: Syncing Catalogs with thousands of Libraries in 120 Countries through OCLC

#anna's archive #cataloguing #metadata #oclc #worldcat #open access #libraries

[jalonsoarevalo]

Worldcat.Org y WorldCat Find inegran recomendaciones de libros generadas por IA

OCLC. «OCLC Introduces AI-Generated Book Recommendations in WorldCat.Org and WorldCat Find Beta», 21 de junio de 2023. https://www.oclc.org/en/news/releases/2023/20230621-ai-book-recs-worldcatorg.html. OCLC está realizando pruebas beta de recomendaciones de libros generadas por inteligencia artificial (IA) en WorldCat.org, el sitio Web que permite a los usuarios explorar las colecciones de miles…

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#Bibliotecas #Catálogos #Inteligencia artificial #OCLC #Recomendaciones #WorldCat

[bluesyemre]

Library Collaboration as a Strategic Choice: Evaluating Options for Acquiring Capacity

Library Collaboration as a Strategic Choice: Evaluating Options for Acquiring Capacity

The OCLC Research report Library Collaboration as a Strategic Choice: Evaluating Options for Acquiring Capacity explores library collaboration as a key strategy for academic libraries in acquiring needed capacity, but also contextualizes it as one sourcing approach among a range of options available to libraries.  The decision for academic libraries to collaborate can yield distinct benefits,…

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#Brian Lavoie #OCLC #reports

[thefearofcod]

I MERGED SOME RECORDS AND IT JUST DIDNT CHANGE ANYTHING BETWEEN 500 AND 710 IM GOING TO SCREAM. CONNEXION WHY. ALMA ALSO WHY

#now all of oclc knows I’m a fool #make your speeches to the foxes general #oooooooooo some of those 650s were FUCKIN GOOD TOO

[tharsei-thanate]

001.92 is the dewey # for ufos. and 001.942 is also the dewey # for ufos. cannot figure out what the difference is 😭😭

#even going up the ladder 001.94 is mysteries #also looks like most libraries use 001.942 #but i still cant find any info about 001.92 and its driving me bonkers. i need to know!!!! #(it's possible it's defunct or something but i cant even find a list of defunct numbers) #anyway im gonna email oclc directly bc im going crazy about this #tt #library.txt

[anotherpapercut]

my coworker thinks that actor Tim Curry is Lemony Snicket and I'm not sure if I should correct her

#they were like ''why does oclc list daniel handler as a pseudonym and not tim curry?'' #and i tried to gently be like well they are different people but i dont think they were listening

[safyresky]

Me: (catalogues four books in a row in quick succession)

Me: wow!! I'm getting so much work done! Yay!

Me: (remembering that a spreadsheet to track cataloguing exists and that I haven't added to it in at LEAST the last 5 books)

Me: 🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠

#dani speaks #dani works special collections #it's the melty emoji. in case u can't see it. if u even care. #It's FINE I'll add them FAST but I'll have to hunt down which OCLC i used for each title #and two of them had records already but they were BAD #so i MERGED THEM with GOOD RECORDS and then sprinkled 590s like salt bae #work work work work work

[books-and-glitter]

I was so excited I could change fonts on my work program but it doesn't have a symbol I need so it just shows as a box which defeats the purpose.

I am heartbroken honestly

#rip my comic sans dreams #if they could add the oclc delimiter symbol for me i would be forever greatful

[olruggioofthetorch]

There's a book about Russian comic history I desperately want to get my hands on but the new catalog at work hates displaying links to accessing ebooks

#Curse you oclc #gwen txt

[bluesyemre]

Everything you always wanted to know about Irish Libraries

Everything you always wanted to know about Irish Libraries

The content for this informative online event comes from the Library Association of Ireland, the Local Government Management Agency and local libraries. The perfect combination to get us ready for the live WLIC in #Dublin on 24-26 July! The event focused on sharing best practices, bringing on important themes of today and tomorrow, and enhancing the local approaches, in order to deal with current…

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#IFLA #irish libraries #OCLC #video #videos #YouTube

[pretensesoup]

How to Publish a Book, pt 2

Q: I'd like to do a print book too, not just an ebook. A: Do you realize that if you do a print book, your mom is going to read it? And the book has sex in there? Like, explicit gay sex? Like it says the word "cock" right there on the page.

Q: Yeah, she's like 77, she knows that sex exists. I've made my peace with this. A: All right, here we go. Publish on Demand books in some number of easy-ish steps.

There are a bunch of options for POD publishing now. IngramSpark, KDP, Draft2Digital, Lulu, etc. Other websites like Barnes & Noble will let you set up paperback publishing but outsource the actual printing to IngramSpark (IS). I think a bunch of these services do. IS is also slightly better if you want to have bookstores sell your book, have it in libraries, etc., because most bookstores won't order from Amazon, for obvious reasons. For Dionysus in Wisconsin, I've done both IS and Amazon, letting IS distribute to anywhere that isn't the Zon.

OH, IS allows preorders for paperbacks while the Zon doesn't.

First, you're going to need to write and edit the book. We went over this in pt. 1. Please refer there if you have any questions on this step. Okay, here is the exhaustive list of what to do once you're ready.

1. Decide what size the physical book should be. Look around your house at books in your genre and select the size that is most pleasing to you. This is called the trim size.

2. If you uploaded your text into a typesetting program like Atticus, tell it your trim size, preferred typeface size, line spacing, and margins and have it spit out a pdf. Otherwise, set Word up with those specifications. KDP has a helpful site where you can calculate the correct inner margins for your number of pages, while I think somehow IS just requires a .5" or .625" margin for all sizes (this doesn't make sense; I assume you just have to fix it after seeing a proof?). The book's gonna be exactly the same, so just do the same thing in both places.

Okay, one thing I couldn't find any guidance on is what size to make the typeface and line spacing. I wound up going with 11 pt typeface and 1.4 spacing. I figured this out by printing out the first page of my book, cutting it out at the correct size (5"x8") and comparing it to pages in similar books until I found one that looked readable and pretty. Anything from 10-12 is probably fine, also 1.1-1.4 spacing, but keep in mind that small/densely spaced typefaces will make your text look more intimidating. Someone on Mastodon said 1.5 spacing looks like a student paper, which I also agree with.

There are loads of websites that detail what typefaces to use for what types of books. "Look at your genre and try to match" is reasonable advice here too.

3. You need not just a cover, but a spine and a back cover. Books are three dimensional objects!

If you hire an artist, they should just be able to provide a wrap-around cover that is appropriate dimensions (again, KDP and IS both have templates), but if you're doing it yourself, I suggest laying out the entire cover on one large sheet of paper/canvas and doing your art like that rather than trying to photoshop together various pieces, unless you are really, really good at color leveling etc. You're gonna want to make sure that you have at least 300 dpi. Make sure you use open access typefaces or that you have rights to use them, ditto for any images you collage into stuff.

GIMP is a great free photoshop alternative. ImageMagick is a free image manipulation program that is incredibly powerful. I had to use ImageMagick to flip my cover file into CMYK and create a PDF. The command you want is this:

magick "inputfile.png" -colorspace sRGB -colorspace CMYK "outputfile.pdf"

4. Submitting your file for stuff: copyright here, LCCN (Library of Congress Control Number) here. Neither of these is obligatory, but both are cool in their own way. LCCN is a way for Library of Congress to pre-catalog your data (creating a stub record in OCLC) so that if a library acquires your book, it's easier for them to get it on the shelf. You need to submit your request for this PRIOR TO THE MONTH OF PUBLICATION. However, you don't need a final manuscript to submit, just a summary of the book. Also, note that you can only retroactively submit your MS for copyright registration for THREE MONTHS after publication, so decide now if you want it. And yes, everything you write in the US is automatically copyrighted, but having a certificate to prove it is nice in a court battle. Also also, you WILL want a finished copy of the text to submit when you make this request, or else you will have to submit two printed copies. By MAIL. So you have to GO OUT OF YOUR HOUSE TO THE POST OFFICE. UGH. (Technically, you are requested to send in a print copy for the LCCN program too. I don't think that's obligatory, but am I gonna pass up a chance to have my book fully cataloged by LOC? Fuck no.)

5. OKAY, assuming you got everything done, now you need an ISBN.

Do you really? Kind of. If you're only publishing on KDP, they'll give you a free one. But you can't reuse it if you try to also publish on IS. The reverse is also true. Technically, the entity that assigns the ISBN is the publisher, so this makes Amazon/IS the publisher of your book. Also, it makes editions slightly weird (technically, it's supposed to be one ISBN per edition). ANYWAY, in the US you buy ISBNs through Bowkers. Don't let them sell you barcodes or any of that garbage. Just buy your ISBN(s).

Sometimes, people report putting in information in KDP and then having the ISBN rejected as "in use" when inputting it into IS, so do this next part all at once. First, assign your ISBN to your book in the Bowkers database. Then assign it to your book at IS and save as draft. Then assign it to your book at KDP and save as draft.

One other note. If you have set up a business to be your press name (mine is Winnowing Fan Press, because the main character's name is Ulysses and I am a GIANT NERD), that will be set up as your publishing house in Bowkers. You won't have an imprint unless you specify one. (An imprint is like a special line of books, so Harlequin has a "digital-first" imprint called Carina Press that specializes in LGBT+ romance, because why would you publish LGBT+ romance in paperback first, ugh.) BUT Amazon will ask what the imprint is for your ISBN and it will be THE NAME OF THE PUBLISHING HOUSE. Why is Amazon using the term differently from everyone else? I DON'T KNOW. JUST GO WITH IT.

6. Upload all your files. Look at the previewers/e-proofs to make sure everything looks okay. Panic and reupload them five times with minute changes.

7. Set a price.

For real at this point I hope you're done making changes, because you suddenly have at least three versions across two different sites to update if you suddenly decide to add a credit for your author photo or something. (cough)

How to set a price the easy way: look at other similar books in your genre (your comps) and just set your book to that price (hopefully you aren't losing money that way).

8. You can order a physical proof at this stage. But if you want author copies, you're going to have to publish your book, meaning it becomes publicly available. I think that if you get through the KDP screens and hit "publish book," it goes live. So...save it as a draft; don't hit the go button until you're ready. IS meanwhile lets you make it available for preorder.

Deadlines: Try to get everything done and uploaded by five days before your planned publication date.

@tryxyhijinks I think that's everything. Wow, I'm tired now.

#how to publish a book #self publishing #print on demand #writeblr #writingcommunity #dionysus in wisconsin

[thesparrow1996]

i am supposed to be working on a presentation i have to do on tuesday which i have barely started but the presentation is an introduction to oclc and worldcat which is difficult to find scholarly sources for because no one is writing about the development of oclc in lis journals. it’s all very technical or specific to contemporary issues in specific institutions. comic books that won’t be released for seven months on the other hand..

[juliesandothings]

a photo of the Lester Young Family L-R: Cousine Boot’s wife, Lester’s mother, Cousin Spot’s wife, and in front is Lester Young (photo credit Mary Young)

from Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen by Linda Dahl, Limelight Editions, NY, 1984

https://www.worldcat.org/title/stormy-weather-the-music-and-lives-of-a-century-of-jazzwomen/oclc/10020976

#jazzwomen #jazzfam #lester young #linda dahl