WorldCat as a first hit
June 29th, 2004I need to get a book and threw what I knew about the book into Google (I know, not the first place to look, but I was a bit rushed and figured it might help).
I was shocked to see that the first hit was a link to the WorldCat record for the book I was trying to locate. I’m not sure why it came up first (no rhyme or reason why it would and the other hits on the page weren’t bad either), but it did. Plus, I just had enter NY in the query box and a listing of libraries that owned the book came right up. Hip Hip Hooray!!
I know that Google had started to index OCLC records, but this is the first time that I came up with a hit while doing some research. Plus, a first result is great. I hope that this happens more in the future and that libraries can take advantage of it somehow.