OCLC has recently announced that they have uploaded 1200 records from the National Library of South Africa, and preparations are being made to load 8000 records from the National Library of Australia into the WorldCat Registry.

WorldCat Registry is a directory service of libraries and their organizations. The National Library of Australia is contributing data from the Australian Libraries Gateway.

Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC says “The aim of the WorldCat Registry is to consolidate as much of that data (about libraries) as possible, making the network work much more effectively for libraries and their users. Once data about an institution and its services is available, it may be used by many others. The registry is available as a Web site for human lookup. More importantly it is designed for other applications to use as a source of information.” — Announcement 

Soon you will be able to look up information about Australian libraries in WorldCat Registry.

I’m wondering when we might see Libraries Australia bibliographic and holding records appear in WorldCat.