Introduction to Bibliographic Utilities

Definition

• A Bibliographic Utility is any service or organization that provides a database of machine-readable catalog (MARC) records of books, periodicals, multimedia, software, and other documents for use by libraries.
• The database may contain from a few million to tens of millions of records (in the case of OCLC and RLIN).
• Bibliographic utilities typically have hundreds to tens of thousands of member organizations (school, public, academic, special libraries).

How the services are accessed

• Subscription to an ongoing service.
• Contract for specific services.
• Media license (An organization licenses the database or portions thereof)

Services

• Most bibliographic utilities provide a variety of services, including:
  • Cataloging services
  • Authority files
  • Interlibrary loan support
  • Record conversion and numerous other general and customized services.
  • Journal contents databases (OCLC's FirstSearch)

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