The National Library of Poland (Biblioteka Narodowa) and OCLC have signed an agreement to add 1.3 million Polish library records to WorldCat, enriching the world’s largest resource for discovery of library materials and increasing the visibility of these collections for researchers around the world.
The National Library of Poland acts as the central library of the state and one of the most important cultural institutions in Poland. Its mission is to protect national heritage preserved in the form of handwritten, printed, electronic, recorded sound and audiovisual documents. The primary task of the National Library is to acquire, store and permanently archive the intellectual output of Poles, whether the works of citizens living on Polish soil, the most important foreign works, or publications related to Poland and published abroad.
Once the records from the National Library of Poland have been added to WorldCat, they are discoverable on the Web through popular search and partner sites, and throughWorldcat.org.
“Biblioteka Narodowa is looking forward to the great worldwide visibility that WorldCat can offer,” said Dr. Tomasz Makowski, Director General of the National Library of Poland. “And of course we’re very happy with the efficiencies we can achieve by using WorldCat for copy cataloguing.”
“We are pleased to welcome the National Library of Poland to the OCLC cooperative,” said Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO. “Contributions of national bibliographies to WorldCat are critically important to libraries for cataloging, resource sharing and discovery of unique and valuable materials around the world.”
WorldCat is a database of bibliographic information built continuously by OCLC and libraries around the world since 1971. Each record in the WorldCat database contains a bibliographic description of a single item or work and a list of institutions that hold the item. The institutions share these records, using them to create local catalogs, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work. Libraries contribute records for items not found in WorldCat using the OCLC shared cataloging system.
There are currently some 1.4 million Polish records already in WorldCat. This new agreement with the National Library of Poland will nearly double the number of Polish records in the database.
“We are very pleased to be able to enrich WorldCat with additional Polish content,” said Eric van Lubeek, Managing Director, OCLC EMEA. “Polish communities and other researchers around the world who are interested in Polish language literature, history, culture and other important and useful information will certainly benefit from this addition to WorldCat.”
Since 1971, more than 280 million records have been added to WorldCat, spanning more than 6,000 years of recorded knowledge, from about 4800 B.C. to the present. This unique collection of information encompasses records in a variety of formats—books, e-books, serials, sound recordings, musical scores, maps, visual materials, mixed materials and computer files. Like the knowledge it describes, WorldCat grows steadily. Every 1.2 seconds, library members add a new record to WorldCat.
