The Cloud Catalog: One Catalog to Serve Them All – By Steve Coffman
“As a whole, public libraries are the single largest supplier of books in the U.S. No single other outlet can compete with public libraries—not Amazon, not Barnes & Noble, not Walmart or Costco, not all your local bookstores. But you’d never know it to look at us on the web. Type Kate Atkinson’s recent book A God in Ruins (or virtually any other title you want) into Google, for example, and records for Amazon and Barnes & Noble pop right up within the first page of results, along with hits on the author’s and publisher’s websites and dozens of reviews. But although most public libraries carry this book, no library site is anywhere to be found among the first pages of results. For the average reader looking for this title, the library never even shows up as an option, much less the best option, for getting the book at the best price. Our websites don’t measure up very well. While the new book “discovery” sites such as Goodreads and others attract millions of readers each month, even our largest public libraries fail to attract a fraction of that traffic. For example, while Goodreads ranks 67thamong most visited websites in the U.S., with 21.4 million unique visitors per month from the U.S. and 47.6 million from the world as a whole, OCLC’s WorldCat—our largest collective catalog and perhaps the closest thing we have to Goodreads—was ranked 3,748 of all websites in the U.S. and attracted just 487,884 visitors in April 2015, which is less than 3% of the traffic going to Goodreads. So how do institutions that supply nearly half of all the books read in the U.S. end up so invisible on the web? Well, it’s not from a lack of customers, that’s for sure. According to the IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services), collectively, public libraries in the United States had 170,911,488 registered members in 2012, the most recent data available. That number is more than half the total population of the U.S. and almost six times the number of members on Goodreads. Although the IMLS does not keep data on “virtual library visits,” we can wager that the vast majority of those registered borrowers go to the library catalog—either from home or in the library—to find books, check out books, and place holds on titles in circulation…”