WorldCat Works
OCLC has made 197 million bibliographic work descriptions—WorldCat Works—available as linked data. This promises to improve discovery of library collections through a variety of popular sites and web services.
According to OCLC, release of this data marks another step toward providing interconnected linked data views of WorldCat. By making this linked data available, library collections can be exposed to the wider web community, integrating these collections and making them more easily discoverable through websites and services such as Google, Wikipedia and social networks.
‘Bibliographic data stored in traditional record formats has reached its limits of efficiency and utility’ said Richard Wallis, OCLC Technology Evangelist. ‘New technologies, influenced by the Web, now enable us to move toward managing WorldCat data as entities—such as 'Works,' 'People,' 'Places' and more—as part of the global Web of data.’