Thanks to Joanna for bringing this to our attention. Holdings of Australian libraries who are contributors to the Australian National Bibliographic database are now appearing in Worldat search results. I have been waiting for this for quite some time now. It’s time to start thinking about possibiliites for using this data in the WorldCat context for our communities.

I’ve done a few searches in Worldcat for titles I know are in MPOW’s collection, but they don’t all seem to be there as yet. I did find this record with a Bond University holding along with several other Australian libraries.

I was curious to put the geographic data to the test. Bond University is located on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia and has a postcode of 4229. This geographic data appears in the holdings information. But, if I change my location preference to anything other than ‘Australia’ the Bond holding is pushed off to some much distant page of results. Most disconcerting is if I try to get the locations that are closest to postcode 4229 the Bond holding is moved back to 49th in the results list with no indication of the number of miles. It would be cool if Worldcat could automatically change the miles to kilometres when users indicate that they are looking for copies in Australia - or display both.

Interesting too is that Richmond-Tweed Regional library has apparently relocated some 825 miles to Mitcham Victoria - according to Worldcat.
So there are a few bugs to be worked out yet, but this is great news. How are you planning to use this?