MCLS Communique

OCLC number expansion: a good reason to check your “deep links”

December 14th, 2006 Evette Atkin

With WorldCat now over 75 million bibliographic records strong and continuing to grow at a rapid pace, OCLC recently implemented new functionality to enable OCLC record numbers to accommodate 9 digits when the 100 millionth record is added. The new functionality adds a prefix of “ocm” to OCLC record numbers with 1-8 digits; OCLC record numbers with 9 digits will have an “ocn” prefix.

As a result, if you have set up “deep linking” by OCLC record number to enable links from the WorldCat Web interface into your library’s online catalog, you may need to update your administrative module settings to ensure that your deep links continue to work as WorldCat, Open WorldCat and WorldCat.org continue to grow. If your library retains the “ocm” and “ocn” prefixes from OCLC in your local system, you will need to adjust your administrative settings. If your library does not retain these prefixes as it adds OCLC records to its local system, no change is needed.

From the Administrative Module Linking>Web Library Catalogs screen in the WorldCat Services administrative module, you simply choose the appropriate radio button to describe how OCLC numbers are indexed in your library. The options are:

• “Do not add prefix to the OCLC Number” (this is the default setting)
• “Add ocn/ocm prefix based on the OCLC Number”
• “Add the following custom prefix to all OCLC Numbers”

Entry Filed under: Cataloging, MLC News, Resource Sharing, Technical Services