Digital libraries: The National Diet Library helps fill OCLC catalog

Dublin-based library cataloger OCLC recently completed loading 4 million bibliographic records of the National Diet Library, the depository of the Japanese legislative body’s records, onto its WorldCat system.

OCLC said raising visibility of the records and access to them should benefit scholars, students and researchers. The addition of National Diet Library information increases the number of records containing Chinese, Japanese and Korean script data in WorldCat by nearly a third.

WorldCat offers a smorgasbord of records through the bibliographic records of 45 national libraries, including the Library of Congress, on its system.

The National Diet Library, founded in 1948, and OCLC first disclosed the agreement in June. The deal expands the relationship between OCLC and National Diet Library, which has used WorldCat for cataloging of its Western language materials since 2007. The National Diet Library serves as the only depository library in Japan. It requires a listing from all materials published in Japan, preserves them as national cultural heritage and provides various types of bibliographic data. The National Diet Library is also developing the digital library in which digital materials are available directly from its website.

OCLC in late May also disclosed an agreement with the National Library of China to load 2.4 million records onto WorldCat.