Australia's union catalogue synchronises with WorldCat

OCLC’s database synchronisation capability is enabling the National Library of Australia to keep its union catalogue, the Australian National Bibliographic Database, synchronised with WorldCat. The SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) record update went live in January, and records are now appearing in WorldCat within seconds of appearing in the Australian National Bibliographic Database.

According to OCLC, in the first two weeks of using the service 25,169 new records and 280,190 new holdings were added to WorldCat, and 74,880 holdings were deleted. The implementation was the result of coordinated development, configuration and planning involving people in Canberra, Australia, and OCLC offices in Leiden, the Netherlands, and Dublin, Ohio, USA.

The Australian National Bibliographic Database is hosted on Libraries Australia, a resource sharing service coordinated by the National Library for Australian libraries and their users. It is used for reference, collection development, cataloging and interlibrary lending.

Libraries Australia is the second service in the world to use SRU Record Update to WorldCat. The first was the Dutch Union Catalogue.