Bill Carney, Content Manager, WorldCat
"The Google Book Search APIs represent an important advance in accessing the content scanned on behalf of libraries participating in the Google Book Search Library Project. Working together enables us to increase the presence of these libraries and their collections on the Web."
Who They Are
As the world’s largest library cooperative, it is OCLC’s goal to connect people to libraries and their collections—not just books, but electronic and digital collections as well.
WorldCat.org lets you search the collections of the more than 10,000 libraries which participate in the OCLC cooperative. WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their resources on the Web, where most people start their search for information.
Google Book Search and WorldCat
It is OCLC's goal to increase discovery and access to libraries and their collections all over the world. People use WorldCat.org to locate, evaluate, list and review library materials on the Web. Providing them with an easy way to connect with the full (or available) text of works they're interested in through Google Book Search is a great enhancement for the discovery process on WorldCat.org. With this new feature, patrons will be able to locate library content through WorldCat.org, view the text presented by Google via its APIs, and locate a copy of the item in a library nearest to them.
This Google Book Search APIs will also enrich the experience of visitors to WorldCat.org because information seekers can now view full digitized text within WorldCat.org. The more information they are able to find within WorldCat.org the greater their likelihood of connecting to libraries. Now WorldCat.org will be seen as the provider of more evaluative content, which will bring users who start their search on the web back to libraries.
Integration with Google Book Search
OCLC started its integration using the Book Search Dynamic Links feature, which allows users to navigate to a Book Search preview when it is available. Once that was in place, OCLC used the Embedded Viewer API to implement a preview page right on WorldCat.org, using client side code. This preview page maintains the WorldCat navigation, book information, and site style.
From a technical point of view, integration of the embedded book viewer went fairly quickly and we set up the new page within a few hours. It involved putting customized CSS into the header, the passing of a dynamic ISBN/OCLC number, and adding language configuration into the JavaScript call to the API.
What They Did
