Shanghai Library adds two million records to WorldCat

Shanghai Library, China’s largest public library and one of the largest libraries in the world, has contributed two million records to global library resource WorldCat.

The records include 770,000 bibliographic records, representing books and journals published between 1911 and 2013.

‘We are pleased to add our holdings to WorldCat,’ said Shanghai Library director Jianzhong Wu in a statement. ‘Shanghai is a renowned, global city, and the library should be as well. With WorldCat, we not only raise the visibility of our collection to a global level but we also share our national heritage and identity with other libraries and their users through the OCLC WorldShare Interlibrary Loan service.’

WorldCat allows library users to access the collections of 72,000 libraries around the world that participate in the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) global cooperative. This includes hundreds of millions of electronic resources, including ebooks, licensed databases, online periodicals and collections of digital items.

The Shanghai Library, which has been an OCLC member since 1996, holds more than 53 million volumes, comprising one of the richest collections of Chinese literature and historical documents. It merged with the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of Shanghai in 1995 to become the first library in China to combine public library services with science, technology and industry research functions.

Category: Library news