(NOTE: this page is from spring 2012 and thus much of the information is quite dated.)
At the outset of the project we had some questions as to how to best included records for large e-book sets such as EBBO and ECCO, and smaller selective sets from vendors such as SpringerLink and Ebrary. The intention was to include ‘purchased and owned’ e-books and e-journals in the reclamation and collection analysis projects. Upon initial investigation it appeared that the WorldCat Knowledge Base would allow for the setting of holdings for these types of sets without having to send in large batches of marc records for known sets, some of which had licensing restrictions on the records.
Unfortunately, upon further investigation, this was not feasible as of early spring 2012. Some of the issues that arose were:
- Absence of some publishers and collection sets, e.g. from Readex. We were under the impression that all collections sets available for WorldCat Local were also available for the Knowledge Base. This was not the case. Also, some sets, e.g. EEBO, while available, were not complete. We were told that OCLC is aware of this, and the issue would be resolved in a few months.
- Separation of ‘purchased and owned’ materials as opposed to licensed materials. It was not possible to flag things as one or the other.
- In regards to e-books, it was hoped that PubGet would work with e-book vendors to load purchased titles into the WolrdCat Knowledge base. At this time PubGet does not handle e-books.
While some schools are pursuing the WKB in conjunction with WorldCat Local, it was deemed infeasible to use it for reclamation and collection activities at this time (Spring 2012).