Tuesday, June 19th, 2018

Five million more Library of Congress records

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We’ve recently imported 5,148,400 new records from the Library of Congress into OverCat, LibraryThing’s data repository. This brings the total number of records in OverCat to nearly 78 million! That’s 78 million high-quality library (MARC) records you can use in cataloging on LibraryThing.

This new dataset was produced by the Library of Congress from records in the 2014 Retrospective file sets—the most recent currently available. The Library of Congress provides these MARC records as part of its MARC Open Access program. Although LibraryThing adds MARC records to Overcat as members search for them, this is our first mass update from Library of Congress data since OverCat debuted in 2010.

Thanks to developer CCatalfo‘s efforts to make this happen. Notice anything different in OverCat? Join the discussion and tell us about it on Talk.

Further reading

Labels: cataloging, library of congress

6 Comments:

  1. elenchus says:

    Good stuff, I much appreciate the continued fortifying of OverCat — it remains my source of choice when adding new titles.

  2. Dave Dayanan says:

    This is great. Congratulations!

  3. Shelly says:

    So does it mean we will be having more relevant results other than Amazon?

    • Loranne says:

      Can you say more about what you mean by “more relevant”? It definitely means that there are more records to choose from on the Library of Congress data source, specifically.

  4. patrick taylor says:

    I am offten depressed by the associated information offered by Amazon in that the dimensions of books and the weights seem fictitious.

  5. Phillip Lund says:

    I do not rely on Amazon/Audible sources as a of information. There are much better means of determining the books that I read-especially online. I do appreciate Librarything as a source of information.

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