As announced elsewhere, WorldCat now supports user additions such as reviews, notes and tables of contents. The original post stated that it was Wiki functionality though I didn’t see that, as others in the comments noted. It’s been updated to stated that it has a Wiki backend and supports Wiki Markup though I don’t see either of those either. For this review I will presume there is absolutely nothing Wiki-related and focus on other things.

The first thing I noticed was that I was required to login to add content. This makes sense and I was happy to see that I could login with my WebJunction information. FirstSearch usernames are also allowed which works since only libraries that subscribe to FirstSearch are in OpenWorldCat now, or so it says on the homepage.

Overall the interface is clean and easy to use and the features are nice. It’s important to note that my library appears to have holdings covered in it, so it may be more useful for me that others. Having said that I think there are plenty of areas where it could grow and here’s some of my ideas for reference.

IANAL: I am not a librarian. I am looking at this as an outsider. What some call “a patron”. As such I have no real idea the politics, service agreements, purpose or otherwise behind WorldCat or more specifically OpenWorldCat. What I list below may not be feasible or go against the purpose of said project. Won’t stop be from spewing opinions though.

  1. The content guidelines state that URL's should not be included. As other comments noted this seems a bit awkward and will likely hold the idea back. Not being able to link to author's websites, errata, etc really decreasing the usefulness. I understand that allowing links can be troublesome if people start linking to their stores, etc but that is covered elsewhere in the guidelines. As an example, there is a blog for the book Freakonomics. The example in the comments was that of books that are also available free online.
  2. It would be nice if the service used data from other services. Amazon ratings and the like would really make it more worthwhile to use the service outside of "does my library carry it". Right now if I used OpenWorldCat it would be because I dislike our OPAC, not because it offered something other sites didn't. I could see this being limited to logged in users.
  3. It's hard to get the search going. If I go to worldcatlibraries.org I then have to click "try a search" to get to a search interface. I can understand having partners but there should really be a easy to find interface to search OpenWorldCat. Is there one? I'm not installing browser plugins and I use Safari at home. Is there a website that lets you choose a partner and start your search? Until there is a library.google and library.yahoo I don't think the search will take off. I'm not going to put in site:worldcatlibraries.org. I think there's quite a bit that could be done to advertise this service to the public and making it easier to access.
  4. Since I have to login to change things it would be nice if there were features worthwhile of getting a login. Things like reading lists would really make the service worth using. You could allow people to form reading groups as well which would probably be useful for libraries as well as patrons.
  5. Web services are always a plus.

I guess as it stands it seems like a nice service but I don’t really see the point of using yet. Yes, it’s nice if someone searches for a book title in a search engine they get the option of searching in a library, but it seems like a waste of such a large undertaking for just that. Hopefully they have plenty of things cooking for the future. But if they are going to try to add these features they should really try to make the service more public and easier to access or I don’t think it will take off.

Update: There’s a post at Outgoing that goes over the wiki capabilities. Nice to see though linking seems to be discouraged in the content guidelines.