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What
Are the Major Bibliographic Utilities
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OCLC
- Online Computer
Library Corp.
- Has over 40,000
members
- Has over 48
million unique records
RLIN
- Research
Libraries Information Network
- Oriented towards
academic libraries.
- Has a few hundred
academic members.
- Many more
subscribers.
- Provides access
to over 35 million unique items.
LOC
(Library of Congress)
- Competes with the not-for-profit
bibliographic utilities that license the LOC database.
British Library
National Bibliographic Service (NBS)
- Provides a
database of over 17 million records.
Other
Services
- A number of
private companies provide catalog-support services, including
databases of records.
- These companies
may obtain their records by:
- Licensing
subsets of databases from the major bibliographic
utilities.
- Developing
their own bibliographic databases.
- The databases,
though, are usually much smaller, though oriented to the most
common and current books different types of libraries might have
on their shelves.
- Types and
examples of alternative bibliographic database providers:
- Library
automation system vendors
- Example:
Innovative Interfaces
- Content
database vendors
- Library
catalog conversion services